Impromptu measurement infrastructures using RTP

Dedicated infrastructures for end-to-end measurements are complex to deploy and manage. Equipment cost, the requirements for reporting bandwidth, and the administrative diversity of the Internet, are factors that potentially hamper scalability. This paper describes the architecture and implementation of an alternative approach in which the end-to-end probing and measurement reporting functions are embedded in a transport protocol, namely RTP (real-time transport protocol). Suitably enabled hosts in a multicast group are effectively co-opted to form an impromptu measurement infrastructure. Coupled with our previous work on multicast-based inference (see Adams, A. et al., IEEE Commun. Magazine, 2000), this enables the determination of the performance characteristics of internal network links of very large multicast distribution trees. Our experimental results show that an accuracy of about 1 part in 10 is attainable when inferring link loss rates in the 1% to 10% range, down to 1 part in 3 for loss rates down to 0.1%, this for probes generated by a regular audio source over a few hundred seconds.

[1]  Robert Nowak,et al.  Passive Unicast Network Tomography based on TCP Monitoring , 2000 .

[2]  Robert Nowak,et al.  Network Loss Inference Using Unicast End-to-End Measurement , 2000 .

[3]  Vern Paxson,et al.  An architecture for large-scale Internet measurement , 1998, IEEE Commun. Mag..

[4]  Donald F. Towsley,et al.  Multicast-based loss inference with missing data , 2002, IEEE J. Sel. Areas Commun..

[5]  Mark Handley,et al.  Guidelines for Writers of RTP Payload Format Specifications , 1999, RFC.

[6]  Jean-Chrysotome Bolot.  End-to-end packet delay and loss behavior in the internet , 1993, SIGCOMM 1993.

[7]  D. Rubin,et al.  Statistical Analysis with Missing Data , 1988 .

[8]  Mark Crovella,et al.  Measuring Bottleneck Link Speed in Packet-Switched Networks , 1996, Perform. Evaluation.

[9]  Donald F. Towsley,et al.  Multicast topology inference from measured end-to-end loss , 2002, IEEE Trans. Inf. Theory.

[10]  Donald F. Towsley,et al.  Measurement and modelling of the temporal dependence in packet loss , 1999, IEEE INFOCOM '99. Conference on Computer Communications. Proceedings. Eighteenth Annual Joint Conference of the IEEE Computer and Communications Societies. The Future is Now (Cat. No.99CH36320).

[11]  Kevin C. Almeroth,et al.  RTCP Reporting Extensions , 2002 .

[12]  Michael A. West,et al.  Bayesian Inference on Network Traffic Using Link Count Data , 1998 .

[13]  Nick G. Duffield,et al.  Multicast inference of packet delay variance at interior network links , 2000, Proceedings IEEE INFOCOM 2000. Conference on Computer Communications. Nineteenth Annual Joint Conference of the IEEE Computer and Communications Societies (Cat. No.00CH37064).

[14]  B. Yu,et al.  Time-varying network tomography: router link data , 2000, 2000 IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory (Cat. No.00CH37060).

[15]  Henning Schulzrinne,et al.  RTP Profile for Audio and Video Conferences with Minimal Control , 2003, RFC.

[16]  Allen B. Downey.  Using pathchar to estimate Internet link characteristics , 1999, SIGCOMM '99.

[17]  Donald F. Towsley,et al.  Multicast-based inference of network-internal loss characteristics , 1999, IEEE Trans. Inf. Theory.

[18]  Steven McCanne,et al.  Scaling end-to-end multicast transports with a topologically-sensitive group formation protocol , 1999, Proceedings. Seventh International Conference on Network Protocols.

[19]  Y. Vardi,et al.  Network Tomography: Estimating Source-Destination Traffic Intensities from Link Data , 1996 .

[20]  Steven McCanne,et al.  Inference of multicast routing trees and bottleneck bandwidths using end-to-end measurements , 1999, IEEE INFOCOM '99. Conference on Computer Communications. Proceedings. Eighteenth Annual Joint Conference of the IEEE Computer and Communications Societies. The Future is Now (Cat. No.99CH36320).

[21]  Roderick J. A. Little,et al.  Statistical Analysis with Missing Data , 1988 .

[22]  Henning Schulzrinne,et al.  RTP: A Transport Protocol for Real-Time Applications , 1996, RFC.

[23]  Donald F. Towsley,et al.  Inferring link loss using striped unicast probes , 2001, Proceedings IEEE INFOCOM 2001. Conference on Computer Communications. Twentieth Annual Joint Conference of the IEEE Computer and Communications Society (Cat. No.01CH37213).

[24]  Van Jacobson,et al.  A tool to infer characteristics of internet paths , 1997 .

[25]  Vern Paxson,et al.  End-to-end Internet packet dynamics , 1997, SIGCOMM '97.

[26]  Donald F. Towsley,et al.  Multicast-based inference of network-internal delay distributions , 2002, TNET.

[27]  R. Caceres,et al.  Inference of internal loss rates in the MBone , 1999, Seamless Interconnection for Universal Services. Global Telecommunications Conference. GLOBECOM'99. (Cat. No.99CH37042).

[28]  Don Towsley,et al.  The use of end-to-end multicast measurements for characterizing internal network behavior , 2000, IEEE Commun. Mag..

[29]  Alfred O. Hero,et al.  Estimation of network link loss rates via chaining in multicast trees , 2001, 2001 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing. Proceedings (Cat. No.01CH37221).