Abstract
We analyze delays of traceroute probes, i.e. packets that elicit ICMP TimeExceeded messages, for a full range of probe sizes up to 9000 bytes as observed on unloaded high-end routers. Our ultimate motivation is to use traceroute RTTs for Internet mapping of router and PoP (ISP point-of-presence) level nodes, including potentially gleaning information on equipment models, link technologies, capacities, latencies, and spatial positions. To our knowledge it is the first study to examine in a reliable testbed setting the detailed statistics of ICMP response generation.
We find that two fundamental assumptions about ICMP often do not hold in modern routers, namely that ICMP delays are a linear function of packet size and that ICMP generation rate is equal to the capacity of the inteface on which probes are received. The primary causes of these violations appear to be optimizations that suppress size dependence, e.g. buffer carving, and rate-limiting of internal ICMP packet and bit rates. Our results suggest that the linear model of packet delay as a function of packet size merits revisiting for many situations, especially for packets over 1500 bytes. Our findings also suggest possibilities of developing new techniques for bandwidth estimation and router fingerprinting.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Pasztor, A., Veitch, D.: The packet size dependence of packet pair like methods. In: IWQoS (2002)
Jain, M., Dovrolis, C.: End-to-end available bandwidth: measurement methodology, dynamics, and relation with TCP throughput. In: Sigcomm (2002)
Katti, S., Katabi, D., Blake, C., Kohler, E., Strauss, J.: Multiq: Automated detection of multiple bottlenecks along a path. In: IMC (2004)
Spring, N., Mahajan, R., Wetherall, D.: Measuring ISP topologies with Rocketfuel. In: Sigcomm (2002)
Spring, N., Wetherall, D., Anderson, T.: Reverse engineering the Internet. In: HotNets (2003)
Mahajan, R., Spring, N., Wetherall, D., Anderson, T.: User-level Internet path diagnosis. In: SOSP (2003)
Jacobson, V.: Pathchar - a tool to infer characteristics of Internet paths (1997), ftp.ee.lbl.gov/pathchar
Broido, A., Claffy, K.: Internet Topology: connectivity of IP graphs. In: SPIE, vol. 4526 (2001)
Hohn, N., Veitch, D., Papagiannaki, K., Diot, C.: Bridging router performance and queueing theory. In: Sigmetrics (2004)
Bovy, C.J., Mertodimedjo, H.T., Hooghiemstra, G., Uijtervaal, H., van Mieghem, P.: Analysis of end-to-end delay measurements in Internet. In: PAM (2002)
Prasad, R.S., Murray, M., Dovrolis, C., Claffy, K.: Bandwidth estimation: metrics, measurements, techniques and tools. In: IEEE Network (2004)
Sriram, A., Murray, M., Hyun, Y., Brownlee, N., Broido, A., Fomenkov, M., Claffy, K.: Comparison of public end-to-end bandwidth estimation tools on high-speed links. In: Dovrolis, C. (ed.) PAM 2005. LNCS, vol. 3431, pp. 306–320. Springer, Heidelberg (2005)
Papagiannaki, K., Moon, S., Fraleigh, C., Thiran, P., Tobagi, F., Diot, C.: Analysis of measured single-hop delay from an operational network. In: Infocom (2002)
Choi, B.-Y., Moon, S., Zhang, Z.-L., Papagiannaki, K., Diot, C.: Analysis of point-to-point packet delay in an operational network. In: Infocom (2004)
Fraleigh, C., Tobagi, F., Diot, C.: Provisioning IP backbone networks to support latency sensitive traffic. In: Infocom (2003)
Newman, D., Chagnot, G., Perser, J.: The internet core routing test: Complete results (2001), http://www.lightreading.com/document.asp?doc_id=6411
Govindan, R., Paxson, V.: Estimating router ICMP generation delays. In: PAM (2002)
Anagnostakis, K., Greenwald, M., Ryger, R.: cing: Measuring network-internal delays. In: Infocom (2003)
Akela, A., Seshan, S., Shaikh, A.: An empirical evaluation of wide-area internet bottlenecks. In: IMC (2003)
Donnelly, S.: High precision timing in passive measurements of data networks, Ph.D. thesis, University of Waikato, Hamilton, New Zealand (2002)
Mochalski, K., Micheel, J., Donnelly, S.: Packet delay and loss at the Auckland Internet access path. In: PAM (2002)
Graham, I.D., Pearson, M., Martens, J., Donnelly, S.: Dag - A cell capture board for ATM measurement systems (1997), http://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/Pub/Html/ATMDag/dag.html
Endace: Measurement Systems (2004), http://www.endace.com
Micheel, J., Donnelly, S., Graham, I.: Precision timestamping of network packets. In: IMW (2001)
CAIDA: Bandwidth estimation project (2004), http://www.caida.org/projects/bwest
Keys, K., Moore, D., Koga, R., Lagache, E., Tesch, M., claffy, k.: The architecture of CoralReef: Internet Traffic monitoring software suite. In: PAM (2001)
Berrou, C., Glavieux, A., Thitimajshima, P.: Near Shannon limit error-correcting coding and encoding: turbo codes. In: IEEE Int’l Conference on Conmmunications (1993)
Moon, S.B., Skelly, P., Towsley, D.: Estimation and removal of clock skew from network delay measurements, Tech.Rep.98-43, UMass Amherst (Infocom (1998)
Prasad, R., Dovrolis, C., Mah, B.: The effect of store-and-forward devices on per-hop capacity estimation. In: Infocom (2003)
Broido, k.A., King, R., Nemeth, E., Claffy: Radon spectroscopy of packet delay. In: ITC 18 (2003)
Ribeiro, V., Riedi, R., Baraniuk, R., Navratil, J., Cottrell, L.: pathChirp: Efficient Available Bandwidth Estimation for Network Paths. In: PAM (2003)
Cisco: How to read the output of the show controller frfab / tofab queue commands on a Cisco 12000 Series Internet Router. Document ID 18002 (2004), http://www.cisco.com
Barford, P., Sommers, J.: Comparing probe and router-based packet loss measurement. In: Internet Computing (2004)
Mah, B.: pchar: a tool for measuring Internet path characteristics (1999), http://www.kitchenlab.org/www/bmah/Software/pchar
Downey, A.B.: Using pathchar to estimate Internet link characteristics. In: Sigcomm (1999)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2005 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Broido, A., Hyun, Y., claffy, k. (2005). Spectroscopy of Traceroute Delays. In: Dovrolis, C. (eds) Passive and Active Network Measurement. PAM 2005. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 3431. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-31966-5_22
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-31966-5_22
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-25520-8
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-31966-5
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)