Neighbor-Cooperative Measurement of Network Path Quality

Abstract

In the current Internet landscape, a stub autonomous system (AS) could choose from a number of providers and peers to advertise its routes. However, the route selection may not always result in a best choice in terms of end-to-end path performance. Instead of having an AS to monitor all possible paths, we argue that it is much more effective and beneficial for a number of neighboring ASes to cooperate in the path measurement. In this paper, we present a neighbor-cooperative measurement system in which each participating AS conducts measurement using their current routes for the same set of remote endpoints. A collation of the measurement results can help identify and correct poor routes, compare different providers' network services, and diagnose network performance problems. We report measurement results from an actual deployment involving eight neighboring universities for over a year.