Detection, Understanding, and Prevention of Traceroute Measurement Artifacts

TL;DR

This paper investigates common artifacts in traceroute measurements, identifies load balancing as a cause, and introduces Paris traceroute, a tool that reduces these artifacts for more accurate internet topology mapping.

Contribution

It introduces Paris traceroute, a new measurement tool that controls packet headers to mitigate artifacts caused by load balancing, improving route accuracy.

Findings

Many observed structures are measurement artifacts.

Load balancing causes false loops, cycles, and diamonds.

Paris traceroute reduces measurement artifacts.

Abstract

Traceroute is widely used: from the diagnosis of network problems to the assemblage of internet maps. Unfortu- nately, there are a number of problems with traceroute methodology, which lead to the inference of erroneous routes. This paper studies particular structures arising in nearly all traceroute measurements. We characterize them as "loops", "cycles", and "diamonds". We iden- tify load balancing as a possible cause for the appear- ance of false loops, cycles and diamonds, i.e., artifacts that do not represent the internet topology. We pro- vide a new publicly-available traceroute, called Paris traceroute, which, by controlling the packet header con- tents, provides a truer picture of the actual routes that packets follow. We performed measurements, from the perspective of a single source tracing towards multiple destinations, and Paris traceroute allowed us to show that many of the particular structures we observe are indeed traceroute measurement artifacts.