NetQuery: a knowledge plane for reasoning about network properties

Depending on their configuration, administration, and provisioning, networks provide drastically different features. For instance, some networks provide little failure resilience while others provision failover capacity and deploy middleboxes to protect against denial of service attacks [1, 2]. Yet the standard IP interface masks these differences; every network appears to provide the same basic "dial-tone" service. Consequently, clients that desire certain network properties must resort to ad hoc techniques to detect these differences or must target the lowest common denominator service.