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Touring the internet in a TCP sidecar

Published: 25 October 2006 Publication History

Abstract

An accurate router-level topology of the Internet would benefit many research areas, including network diagnosis, inter-domain traffic engineering, and overlay construction. We present TCP Sidecar and Passenger, two elements of a system for router-level Internet topology discovery. Sidecar transparently injects measurement probes into non-measurement TCP streams, while Passenger combines TTL-limited probes with the often-ignored IP record route option. The combined approach mitigates problems associated with traceroute-based topology discovery, including abuse reports, spurious edge inference from multi-path routing, unresolved IP aliases, long network timeouts, and link discovery behind NATs and firewalls. We believe that we are the first mapping project to measure MPLS use with ICMP extensions and record route behavior when the TTL is not decremented. We are able to discover NATs when monitoring TCP connections that tunnel through them. In this paper, we present preliminary results for TCP Sidecar and Passenger on PlanetLab. Our experiments inject measurement probes into traffic generated both from the CoDeeN Web proxy project and from a custom web crawler to 166,745 web sites.

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    IMC '06: Proceedings of the 6th ACM SIGCOMM conference on Internet measurement
    October 2006
    356 pages
    ISBN:1595935614
    DOI:10.1145/1177080
    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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    Publication History

    Published: 25 October 2006

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    Author Tags

    1. network topology discovery
    2. passenger
    3. record route
    4. sidecar

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    IMC06
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    IMC06: Internet Measurement Conference
    October 25 - 27, 2006
    Rio de Janeriro, Brazil

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    Cited By

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    • (2023)Schooling NOOBs with eBPFProceedings of the 1st Workshop on eBPF and Kernel Extensions10.1145/3609021.3609302(21-27)Online publication date: 10-Sep-2023
    • (2022)Internet scale reverse tracerouteProceedings of the 22nd ACM Internet Measurement Conference10.1145/3517745.3561422(694-715)Online publication date: 25-Oct-2022
    • (2020)Let There Be Light: Revealing Hidden MPLS Tunnels With TNTIEEE Transactions on Network and Service Management10.1109/TNSM.2019.296227817:2(1239-1253)Online publication date: Jun-2020
    • (2020)Space Edge Cloud Enabling Service Migration for On-Orbit Service2020 12th International Conference on Communication Software and Networks (ICCSN)10.1109/ICCSN49894.2020.9139102(233-239)Online publication date: Jun-2020
    • (2020)FlowTrace : A Framework for Active Bandwidth Measurements Using In-band Packet TrainsPassive and Active Measurement10.1007/978-3-030-44081-7_3(37-51)Online publication date: 18-Mar-2020
    • (2020)A First Comparative Characterization of Multi-cloud Connectivity in Today’s InternetPassive and Active Measurement10.1007/978-3-030-44081-7_12(193-210)Online publication date: 18-Mar-2020
    • (2019)TNT, Watch me Explode: A Light in the Dark for Revealing MPLS Tunnels2019 Network Traffic Measurement and Analysis Conference (TMA)10.23919/TMA.2019.8784525(65-72)Online publication date: Jun-2019
    • (2019)Service Traceroute: Tracing Paths of Application FlowsPassive and Active Measurement10.1007/978-3-030-15986-3_8(116-128)Online publication date: 13-Mar-2019
    • (2017)Towards a renewed alias resolution with space search reduction and IP fingerprinting2017 Network Traffic Measurement and Analysis Conference (TMA)10.23919/TMA.2017.8002907(1-9)Online publication date: Jun-2017
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