Detecting Anomalies Using End-to-End Path Measurements

Abstract

In this paper, we propose new "low-overhead" network monitoring techniques to detect violations of path-level QoS guarantees like end-to-end delay, loss, etc. Unlike existing path monitoring schemes, our approach does not calculate QoS parameters for all paths. Instead, it monitors QoS values for only a few paths, and exploits the fact that path anomalies are rare and anomalous states are well separated from normal operation, to rule out path QoS violations in most situations. We propose a heuristic to select a small subset of network paths to monitor while ensuring that no QoS violations are missed. Experiments with an ISP topology from the Rocketfuel data set show that our heuristic can deliver almost a 50% decrease in monitoring overhead compared to previous schemes.