Towards Active Measurements of Edge Network Outages

Introduction

End-to-end reachability is a fundamental service of the Internet. We study network outages caused by natural disasters [2,5], and political upheavals [8].

We propose a new approach to outage detection using active probing. Like prior outage detection methods [3,4], our method uses ICMP echo requests (“pings”) to detect outages, but we probe with greater density and finer granularity, showing pings can detect outages without supplemental probing.

The main contribution of our work is to define how to interpret pings as outages ($\S$2): defining an outage as a sharp change in block responsiveness relative to recent behavior. We also provide preliminary analysis of outage rate in the Internet edge. Space constrains this poster abstract to only sketches of our approach; details and validation are in our technical report [6]. Our data is available at no charge, see http://www.isi.edu/ant/traces/internet_outages/ .

This work is based on research sponsored by the U.S. Dept. of Homeland Security, S&T HSARPA, BAA 11-01-RIKA and Air Force Research Laboratory, Info. Dir., agreements FA8750-12-2-0344, and D08PC75599. The U.S. Gov’t is authorized to reproduce and distribute reprints notwithstanding any copyright notation thereon. The views herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official policies or endorsements of the DHS or U.S. Government.