Title: A large-scale network diagnosis system based on user-cooperative active measurements

Authors: Atsuo Tachibana; Shigehiro Ano; Masato Tsuru

Addresses: KDDI R&D Laboratories, 2-1-15 Ohara, Fujimino-shi, Japan ' KDDI R&D Laboratories, 2-1-15 Ohara, Fujimino-shi, Japan ' Kyushu Institute of Technology, 680-4 Kawazu, Iizuka-shi, Japan

Abstract: Aiming at large-scale network diagnosis, this paper proposes a user cooperative measurement scheme that utilises many but variable users' off-the-shelf PCs as active measurement end-point nodes (called 'beacons') both for lightly monitoring network performance along many end-to-end paths and for heavily conducting network diagnosis (e.g., identifying degraded links) after detection of an end-to-end performance degradation. In the scheme, the beacons and the measurement paths among them are dynamically selected by considering a trade-off between detection coverage and diagnostic timeliness under operational constraints such as the network resources along the path and the machine resource of the beacons. From an ISP viewpoint, utilising many users' PCs as a measurement infrastructure will be promising, while challenging, to greatly reduce deployment and maintenance costs if possible variation and instability of individual PCs are mitigated. The effectiveness and feasibility of our scheme are demonstrated through large-scale simulations and preliminary real-world experiments using a prototype implementation.

Keywords: network diagnosis; active measurement; performance monitoring; maximum coverage problem; network performance; simulation; user PCs; multiple PCs.

DOI: 10.1504/IJSSC.2013.056027

International Journal of Space-Based and Situated Computing, 2013 Vol.3 No.2, pp.69 - 82

Received: 14 Oct 2012
Accepted: 11 Mar 2013

Published online: 23 Aug 2014 *

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