Implementation and Deployment of a Distributed Network Topology Discovery Algorithm

TL;DR

This paper presents the implementation and deployment of traceroute@home, an open-source tool based on the Doubletree algorithm, for scalable internet topology discovery using distributed measurement monitors.

Contribution

It introduces an open-source implementation of Doubletree, demonstrating its deployment on PlanetLab and providing insights for future enhancements.

Findings

Traceroute@home effectively reduces network load during topology discovery.

Deployment on PlanetLab validated the practicality of the approach.

Lessons learned inform future improvements for scalable topology measurement.

Abstract

In the past few years, the network measurement community has been interested in the problem of internet topology discovery using a large number (hundreds or thousands) of measurement monitors. The standard way to obtain information about the internet topology is to use the traceroute tool from a small number of monitors. Recent papers have made the case that increasing the number of monitors will give a more accurate view of the topology. However, scaling up the number of monitors is not a trivial process. Duplication of effort close to the monitors wastes time by reexploring well-known parts of the network, and close to destinations might appear to be a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack as the probes converge from a set of sources towards a given destination. In prior work, authors of this report proposed Doubletree, an algorithm for cooperative topology discovery, that reduces the load on the network, i.e., router IP interfaces and end-hosts, while discovering almost as many nodes and links as standard approaches based on traceroute. This report presents our open-source and freely downloadable implementation of Doubletree in a tool we call traceroute@home. We describe the deployment and validation of traceroute@home on the PlanetLab testbed and we report on the lessons learned from this experience. We discuss how traceroute@home can be developed further and discuss ideas for future improvements.