Pinpointing Delay and Forwarding Anomalies Using Large-Scale Traceroute Measurements

Romain Fontugne , Cristel Pelsser , Emile Aben and Randy Bush

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Abstract

Understanding network health is essential to improve Internet reliability. For instance, detecting disruptions in peer and provider networks facilitates the identification of connectivity problems. Currently this task is time consuming for network operators. It involves a fair amount of manual observation because operators have little visibility into other networks. In this paper we leverage the RIPE Atlas measurement platform to monitor and analyze network conditions. We propose a set of complementary methods to detect network disruptions from traceroute measurements. A novel method of detecting changes in delays is used to identify congested links, and a packet forwarding model is employed to predict traffic paths and to identify faulty routers in case of packet loss. In addition, aggregating results from each method allows us to easily monitor a network and identify coordinated reports manifesting significant network disruptions, reducing uninteresting alarms. Our contributions consist of a statistical approach providing robust estimation for Internet delays and the study of hundreds of thousands link delays. We present three cases demonstrating that the proposed methods detect real disruptions and provide valuable insights, as well as surprising findings, on the location and impact of identified events.

Publication Details

Publication Type
Conference Paper
Publication Date
November 2017
Published In
Proceedings of the 2017 Internet Measurement Conference, IMC 2017
Pages
15--28
Publisher
ACM
Location
London, United Kingdom
Digital Object Identifier (DOI)
10.1145/3131365.3131384

Suggested citation

Romain Fontugne, Cristel Pelsser, Emile Aben, and Randy Bush. 2017. Pinpointing Delay and Forwarding Anomalies Using Large-Scale Traceroute Measurements. In Proceedings of the 2017 Internet Measurement Conference, IMC 2017. ACM, London, United Kingdom, 15–28. https://doi.org/10.1145/3131365.3131384

BibTeX Citation

@inproceedings{Fontugne2017,
	title        = {Pinpointing Delay and Forwarding Anomalies Using Large-Scale Traceroute Measurements},
	author       = {Romain Fontugne and Cristel Pelsser and Emile Aben and Randy Bush},
	year         = 2017,
	month        = nov,
	booktitle    = {Proceedings of the 2017 Internet Measurement Conference, {IMC} 2017},
	location     = {London, United Kingdom},
	publisher    = {ACM},
	address      = {London, United Kingdom},
	pages        = {15--28},
	doi          = {10.1145/3131365.3131384},
	editor       = {Steve Uhlig and Olaf Maennel},
	abstract     = {Understanding network health is essential to improve Internet reliability. For instance, detecting disruptions in peer and provider networks facilitates the identification of connectivity problems. Currently this task is time consuming for network operators. It involves a fair amount of manual observation because operators have little visibility into other networks. In this paper we leverage the RIPE Atlas measurement platform to monitor and analyze network conditions. We propose a set of complementary methods to detect network disruptions from traceroute measurements. A novel method of detecting changes in delays is used to identify congested links, and a packet forwarding model is employed to predict traffic paths and to identify faulty routers in case of packet loss. In addition, aggregating results from each method allows us to easily monitor a network and identify coordinated reports manifesting significant network disruptions, reducing uninteresting alarms. Our contributions consist of a statistical approach providing robust estimation for Internet delays and the study of hundreds of thousands link delays. We present three cases demonstrating that the proposed methods detect real disruptions and provide valuable insights, as well as surprising findings, on the location and impact of identified events.},
	bibsource    = {dblp computer science bibliography, https://dblp.org},
	biburl       = {https://dblp.org/rec/conf/imc/FontugnePAB17.bib},
	groups       = {International Conferences},
	keywords     = {traceroute, outage, congestion, routing anomaly, statistical analysis, internet delay},
	numpages     = 14
}

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