Locating Disruptions on Internet Paths through End-to-End Measurements

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel end-to-end measurement method using compressed sensing to accurately locate network hops responsible for sudden delay increases in backbone networks, without requiring complex infrastructure.

Contribution

It presents a simple, measurement-only approach leveraging compressed sensing to identify critical network hops causing delay disruptions, improving network troubleshooting efficiency.

Findings

Successfully applied to a real network demonstrating accurate localization of problematic hops.

Outperforms traditional methods by requiring only end-to-end measurements.

Effectively identifies key contributors to delay increases in backbone networks.

Abstract

In backbone networks carrying heavy traffic loads, unwanted and unusual end-to-end delay changes can happen, though possibly rarely. In order to understand and manage the network to potentially avoid such abrupt changes, it is crucial and challenging to locate where in the network lies the cause of such delays so that some corresponding actions may be taken. To tackle this challenge, the present paper proposes a simple and novel approach. The proposed approach relies only on end-to-end measurements, unlike literature approaches that often require a distributed and possibly complicated monitoring / measurement infrastructure. Here, the key idea of the proposed approach is to make use of compressed sensing theory to estimate delays on each hop between the two nodes where end-to-end delay measurement is conducted, and infer critical hops that contribute to the abrupt delay increases. To demonstrate its effectiveness, the proposed approach is applied to a real network. The results are encouraging, showing that the proposed approach is able to locate the hops that have the most significant impact on or contribute the most to abrupt increases on the end-to-end delay.