Failure Control in Multipath Route Tracing

—Traceroute is widely used to report the path packets take between two internet hosts, but the widespread deployment of load balancing routers breaks a basic assumption – that there is only a single such path. We specify an adaptive, stochastic probing algorithm, the Multipath Detection Algorithm (MDA), to report all paths that probes can follow between a source and a destination. We establish the foundations of, and show how to calculate, rigorous statistical guarantees for the discovery of the entire multipath route. We explore algorithm cost/guarantee tradeoffs in real experiments and show the inadequacy of the classic practice of sending three probes per hop.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: INFOCOM
• Authors: Darryl Veitch, Brice Augustin, Renata Teixeira, Timur Friedman
• Keywords: Communications, Entire Multipath Route, INFOCOM 2009, Load Balancing Routers, Multipath Detection Algorithm