Measuring load-balanced paths in the internet

Tools to measure internet properties usually assume the existence of a single path from a source to a destination. However, load-balancing capabilities, which create multiple active paths between two end-hosts, are available in most contemporary routers. This paper proposes a methodology to identify load-balancing routers and characterize load-balanced paths. We enhance our traceroute-like tool, called Paris traceroute, to find all paths between a pair of hosts, and use it from 15 sources to over 68 thousand destinations. Our results show that the traditional concept of a single network path between hosts no longer holds. For instance, 39% of the source-destination pairs in our traces traverse a load balancer. Furthermore, this fraction increases to 70% if we consider the paths between a source and a destination network.

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