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Locating internet bottlenecks: algorithms, measurements, and implications

Published: 30 August 2004 Publication History

Abstract

The ability to locate network bottlenecks along end-to-end paths on the Internet is of great interest to both network operators and researchers. For example, knowing where bottleneck links are, network operators can apply traffic engineering either at the interdomain or intradomain level to improve routing. Existing tools either fail to identify the location of bottlenecks, or generate a large amount of probing packets. In addition, they often require access to both end points. In this paper we present Pathneck, a tool that allows end users to efficiently and accurately locate the bottleneck link on an Internet path. Pathneck is based on a novel probing technique called Recursive Packet Train (RPT) and does not require access to the destination. We evaluate Pathneck using wide area Internet experiments and trace-driven emulation. In addition, we present the results of an extensive study on bottlenecks in the Internet using carefully selected, geographically diverse probing sources and destinations. We found that Pathneck can successfully detect bottlenecks for almost 80% of the Internet paths we probed. We also report our success in using the bottleneck location and bandwidth bounds provided by Pathneck to infer bottlenecks and to avoid bottlenecks in multihoming and overlay routing.

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    SIGCOMM '04: Proceedings of the 2004 conference on Applications, technologies, architectures, and protocols for computer communications
    August 2004
    402 pages
    ISBN:1581138628
    DOI:10.1145/1015467
    • cover image ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review
      ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review  Volume 34, Issue 4
      October 2004
      385 pages
      ISSN:0146-4833
      DOI:10.1145/1030194
      Issue’s Table of Contents
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Published: 30 August 2004

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    Author Tags

    1. active probing
    2. available bandwidth
    3. bottleneck location
    4. packet train

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    August 30 - September 3, 2004
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    • (2021)BottleNet: Hiding Network Bottlenecks Using SDN-Based Topology DeceptionIEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security10.1109/TIFS.2021.307584516(3138-3153)Online publication date: 2021
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