Verifiable Network-Performance Measurements

TL;DR

This paper introduces a systematic, verifiable approach for measuring Internet forwarding performance through voluntary reporting, enabling accurate detection of SLA violations without revealing sensitive topology details.

Contribution

It proposes a novel, verifiable measurement mechanism that relies on voluntary reporting, ensuring performance honesty and tunable resource use, with minimal deployment overhead.

Findings

Mechanism enables verifiable performance measurements.

Requires modest processing at border routers.

Allows trade-off between verification quality and resource use.

Abstract

In the current Internet, there is no clean way for affected parties to react to poor forwarding performance: when a domain violates its Service Level Agreement (SLA) with a contractual partner, the partner must resort to ad-hoc probing-based monitoring to determine the existence and extent of the violation. Instead, we propose a new, systematic approach to the problem of forwarding-performance verification. Our mechanism relies on voluntary reporting, allowing each domain to disclose its loss and delay performance to its neighbors; it does not disclose any information regarding the participating domains' topology or routing policies beyond what is already publicly available. Most importantly, it enables verifiable performance measurements, i.e., domains cannot abuse it to significantly exaggerate their performance. Finally, our mechanism is tunable, allowing each participating domain to determine how many resources to devote to it independently (i.e., without any inter-domain coordination), exposing a controllable trade-off between performance-verification quality and resource consumption. Our mechanism comes at the cost of deploying modest functionality at the participating domains' border routers; we show that it requires reasonable processing and memory resources within modern network capabilities.