Network loss tomography using striped unicast probes

  • Authors:
  • Nick Duffield;Francesco Lo Presti;Vern Paxson;Don Towsley

  • Affiliations:
  • AT&T Labs-Research, Florham Park, NJ;Computer Engineering Department, Universita di Roma, "Tor Vergata", Roma, Italy;ICSI Center for Internet Research, International Computer Science Institute, Berkeley, CA;Department of Computer Science, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA

  • Venue:
  • IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking (TON)
  • Year:
  • 2006

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Abstract

In this paper, we explore the use of end-to-end unicast traffic as measurement probes to infer link-level loss rates. We leverage off of earlier work that produced efficient estimates for link-level loss rates based on end-to-end multicast traffic measurements. We design experiments based on the notion of transmitting stripes of packets (with no delay between transmission of successive packets within a stripe) to two or more receivers. The purpose of these stripes is to ensure that the correlation in receiver observations matches as closely as possible what would have been observed if a multicast probe followed the same path to the receivers. Measurements provide good evidence that a packet pair to distinct receivers introduces considerable correlation which can be further increased by simply considering longer stripes. Using an M/M/1/K model for a link, we theoretically confirm this benefit for stripes. We also use simulation to explore how well these stripes translate into accurate link-level loss estimates. We observe good accuracy with packet pairs, with a typical error of about 1%, which significantly decreases as stripe length is increased.