Detection, understanding, and prevention of traceroute measurement artifacts

DOI10.1016/J.COMNET.2007.11.017zbMATH Open1138.68326arXiv0904.2733OpenAlexW2044892353MaRDI QIDQ2482001FDOQ2482001

Brice Augustin, Matthieu Latapy, Xavier Cuvellier, Renata Teixeira, Fabien Viger, Clémence Magnien, Timur Friedman

Publication date: 16 April 2008

Published in: Computer Networks (Search for Journal in Brave)

Abstract: Traceroute is widely used: from the diagnosis of network problems to the assemblage of internet maps. Unfortu- nately, there are a number of problems with traceroute methodology, which lead to the inference of erroneous routes. This paper studies particular structures arising in nearly all traceroute measurements. We characterize them as "loops", "cycles", and "diamonds". We iden- tify load balancing as a possible cause for the appear- ance of false loops, cycles and diamonds, i.e., artifacts that do not represent the internet topology. We pro- vide a new publicly-available traceroute, called Paris traceroute, which, by controlling the packet header con- tents, provides a truer picture of the actual routes that packets follow. We performed measurements, from the perspective of a single source tracing towards multiple destinations, and Paris traceroute allowed us to show that many of the particular structures we observe are indeed traceroute measurement artifacts.

Full work available at URL: https://arxiv.org/abs/0904.2733

zbMATH Keywords

load balancingtraceroutemeasurement artifactnetwork topology measurement

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

Performance evaluation, queueing, and scheduling in the context of computer systems (68M20) Network design and communication in computer systems (68M10)

Cited In (1)

• Shape Measures of Random Increasing k-trees

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