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Service Traceroute: Tracing Paths of Application Flows

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Passive and Active Measurement (PAM 2019)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCCN,volume 11419))

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Abstract

Traceroute is often used to help diagnose when users experience issues with Internet applications or services. Unfortunately, probes issued by classic traceroute tools differ from application traffic and hence can be treated differently by routers that perform load balancing and middleboxes within the network. This paper proposes a new traceroute tool, called Service traceroute. Service traceroute leverages the idea from paratrace, which passively listens to application traffic to then issue traceroute probes that pretend to be part of the application flow. We extend this idea to work for modern Internet services with support for identifying the flows to probe automatically, for tracing of multiple concurrent flows, and for UDP flows. We implement command-line and library versions of Service traceroute, which we release as open source. This paper also presents an evaluation of Service traceroute when tracing paths traversed by Web downloads from the top-1000 Alexa websites and by video sessions from Twitch and Youtube. Our evaluation shows that Service traceroute has no negative effect on application flows. Our comparison with Paris traceroute shows that a typical traceroute tool that launches a new flow to the same destination discovers different paths than when embedding probes in the application flow in a significant fraction of experiments (from 40% to 50% of our experiments in PlanetLab Europe).

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Notes

  1. 1.

    We use the traditional 5-tuple definition of a flow (protocol, source and destination IP, as well as source and destination port).

  2. 2.

    To make 0Trace work on PlanetLab nodes, we had to replace the library to issue probes from dnet to scapy.

  3. 3.

    Service traceroute failed to run on PlanetLab US nodes due to compatibility issues. PlanetLab US nodes use an old Linux distribution (Fedora 2), which lacks many required tools and libraries necessary to run our program.

References

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the ANR Project N\(^o\) ANR-15-CE25-0013-01 (BottleNet), a Google Faculty Research Award, and Inria through the IPL BetterNet and the associate team HOMENET.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Inria, Paris, France

    Ivan Morandi, Francesco Bronzino & Renata Teixeira

  2. Princeton University, Princeton, USA

    Srikanth Sundaresan

Authors
  1. Ivan Morandi
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  2. Francesco Bronzino
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  3. Renata Teixeira
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  4. Srikanth Sundaresan
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Francesco Bronzino .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Northeastern University, Boston, MA, USA

    David Choffnes

  2. Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, Porto Alegre, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil

    Marinho Barcellos

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Morandi, I., Bronzino, F., Teixeira, R., Sundaresan, S. (2019). Service Traceroute: Tracing Paths of Application Flows. In: Choffnes, D., Barcellos, M. (eds) Passive and Active Measurement. PAM 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11419. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-15986-3_8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-15986-3_8

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-15985-6

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-15986-3

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