Network radar: tomography from round trip time measurements

Knowledge of link specific traffic characteristics is important in the operation and design of wide area networks. Network tomography is a powerful method for measuring characteristics such as delay and loss on network-internal links using end--to--end active probes. Prior work has established the basic mechanisms for the use of tomographic inference techniques in the networking context. However, the measurement methods described in prior network tomography studies require cooperation between sending and receiving end-hosts, which limits the scope of the paths over which the measurements can be made. In this paper, we describe a new network tomographic technique based on round trip time (RTT) measurements which eliminates the need for special-purpose cooperation from receivers. Our technique uses RTT measurements from TCP SYN and SYN-ACK segments to estimate the delay variance of the shared network segment in the standard one sender - two receivers configuration. We call this approach <i>Network Radar</i> since it is analogous to standard radar. We present an analytic evaluation of Network Radar that specifies the variance bounds within which the technique is effective. We also evaluate Network Radar in a series of tests conducted in a controlled laboratory environment using live end hosts and IP routers. These tests demonstrate the boundaries of effectiveness of the RTT-based approach.

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