Efficient Route Tracing from a Single Source

Traceroute is a networking tool that allows one to discover the path that packets take from a source machine, through the network, to a destination machine. It is widely used as an engineering tool, and also as a scientific tool, such as for discovery of the network topology at the IP level. In prior work, authors on this technical report have shown how to improve the efficiency of route tracing from multiple cooperating monitors. However , it is not unusual for a route tracing monitor to operate in isolation. Somewhat different strategies are required for this case, and this report is the first systematic study of those requirements. Standard traceroute is inefficient when used repeatedly towards multiple destinations , as it repeatedly probes the same interfaces close to the source. Others have recognized this inefficiency and have proposed tracing backwards from the destinations and stopping probing upon encounter with a previously-seen interface. One of this technical report's contributions is to quantify for the first time the efficiency of this approach. Another contribution is to describe the effect of non-responding destinations on this efficiency. Since a large portion of destination machines do not reply to probe packets, backwards probing from the destination is often infeasible. We propose an algorithm to tackle non-responding destinations, and we find that our algorithm can strongly decrease probing redundancy at the cost of a small reduction in node and link discovery.

[1]  Mark Santcroos,et al.  Providing Active Measurements as a Regular Service for ISP's , 2001 .

[2]  T. Moors,et al.  Streamlining traceroute by estimating path lengths , 2004, 2004 IEEE International Workshop on IP Operations and Management.

[3]  Robert Beverly,et al.  A Robust Classifier for Passive TCP/IP Fingerprinting , 2004, PAM.

[4]  Kang G. Shin,et al.  Hop-count filtering: an effective defense against spoofed DDoS traffic , 2003, CCS '03.

[5]  K. Claffy,et al.  Topology discovery by active probing , 2002, Proceedings 2002 Symposium on Applications and the Internet (SAINT) Workshops.

[6]  Mark Crovella,et al.  Efficient algorithms for large-scale topology discovery , 2004, SIGMETRICS '05.

[7]  P. Van Mieghem,et al.  Measurements of the hopcount in internet , 2001 .

[8]  David Wetherall,et al.  Scriptroute: A Public Internet Measurement Facility , 2003, USENIX Symposium on Internet Technologies and Systems.

[9]  kc claffy,et al.  Internet topology: connectivity of IP graphs , 2001, SPIE ITCom.

[10]  Ratul Mahajan,et al.  Measuring ISP topologies with rocketfuel , 2002, TNET.

[11]  Steven J. Templeton,et al.  Detecting spoofed packets , 2003, Proceedings DARPA Information Survivability Conference and Exposition.

[12]  Jean-Jacques Pansiot,et al.  On routes and multicast trees in the Internet , 1998, CCRV.

[13]  Ray Jain,et al.  The art of computer systems performance analysis - techniques for experimental design, measurement, simulation, and modeling , 1991, Wiley professional computing.

[14]  Vern Paxson,et al.  End-to-end routing behavior in the Internet , 1996, TNET.

[15]  Renata Teixeira,et al.  In search of path diversity in ISP networks , 2003, IMC '03.

[16]  Anees Shaikh,et al.  Issues with inferring Internet topological attributes , 2002, SPIE ITCom.

[17]  Hans-Werner Braun,et al.  The NLANR network analysis infrastructure , 2000, IEEE Commun. Mag..

[18]  Iana Considerations Section in RFCs.  Special-Use IPv4 Addresses , 2002 .

[19]  Ramesh Govindan,et al.  Heuristics for Internet map discovery , 2000, Proceedings IEEE INFOCOM 2000. Conference on Computer Communications. Nineteenth Annual Joint Conference of the IEEE Computer and Communications Societies (Cat. No.00CH37064).

[20]  Vince Fuller,et al.  Classless Inter-Domain Routing (CIDR): an Address Assignment and Aggregation Strategy , 1993, RFC.

[21]  Yuval Shavitt,et al.  DIMES: let the internet measure itself , 2005, CCRV.

[22]  David P. Anderson,et al.  SETI@home: an experiment in public-resource computing , 2002, CACM.