Abstract
Active measurement tools are important to understand and diagnose performance bottlenecks on the Internet. However, their overhead is a concern because a high number of additional measurement packets can congest the network they try to measure. To address this issue, prior work has proposed in-band approaches that piggyback application traffic for active measurements. However, prior approaches are hard to deploy because they require either specialized hardware or modifications in the Linux kernel. In this paper, we propose FlowTrace–a readily deployable user-space active measurement framework that leverages application TCP flows to carry out in-band network measurements. Our implementation of pathneck using FlowTrace creates recursive packet trains to locate bandwidth bottlenecks. The experimental evaluation on a testbed shows that FlowTrace is able to locate bandwidth bottlenecks as accurately as pathneck with significantly less overhead.
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- 1.
Hu et al. [10] reported that reverse path effects may impact the performance of pathneck as they may perturb the gaps between the ICMP response messages on the way back. Our goal is that FlowTrace performs well when pathneck performs well. Therefore, we do not evaluate the impact of reverse path effects on the performance of FlowTrace in this work for brevity.
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Acknowledgement
We thank the anonymous reviewers and our shepherd, Mirja Kühlewind, for helpful suggestions that improved the paper. We also thank Amogh Dhamdhere for his input in the early stage of this work. This work is supported in part by the National Science Foundation under grant numbers CNS-1617288, CNS-1750175, and CNS-1414177.
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Ahmed, A., Mok, R., Shafiq, Z. (2020). FlowTrace : A Framework for Active Bandwidth Measurements Using In-band Packet Trains. In: Sperotto, A., Dainotti, A., Stiller, B. (eds) Passive and Active Measurement. PAM 2020. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12048. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44081-7_3
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