Network-wide inference of end-to-end path intersections

Network topology information has many uses for networked applications including the design of reliability and performance enhancing schemes. This information is often acquired by network discovery techniques that rely on ICMP and/or SNMP support from the infrastructure. Unfortunately, network infrastructure may support such services at varying levels. In cases where such support is limited, techniques based on strictly end-to-end measurements have been proposed in the literature to infer a logical topology. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end measurement technique that is complimentary to the earlier techniques and relies on multiple-source multiple-destination probing to collect network wide measurements faster. Our technique relies on the interaction between streams of packets at various nodes in the network. Specifically, we aim to measure the reaction of end-to-end probes to a short burst of concentrated traffic (signal) injected to the network. The key assumption is that probes traversing paths that physically intersect with the path of the bursty traffic (signal path) will exhibit extra jitter. The occurrence of extra jitter in the probe packet inter-arrival times matching the signal bursts indicates that the paths of the probe and signal intersect. We conducted an empirical study on an actual production network to evaluate the ability of the technique to detect end-to-end path intersections. Our empirical results indicate that in the network we considered the technique successfully detected path intersections.