GRE Encapsulated Multicast Probing: A Scalable Technique for Measuring One-Way Loss

Abstract

Internet service providers increasingly wish to monitor the performance of customer traffic within their networks. This paper addresses the problem of scalably performing one-way loss measurements across specific network paths. Our solution addresses the issue of scale by exploiting measurement features of the deployed network infrastructure to a large degree. There are three components. Firstly, GRE tunneling is used to control the path followed by measurement traffic in the network. Secondly, innovative probing methods, coupled with standard measurement capabilities, such as NetFlow, are used to isolate the performance of groups of measurement packets. Thirdly, we exploit and extend tomographic inference methods in order to extract the performance of probe traffic on customer paths within the network. This combination yields a powerful yet lightweight method to determine customer performance within the network.

A Simulation Model for Hybrid Multicast

“…This is a manual approach carried out by network administrators and hence does not scale. Furthermore, in the case of Multicast over GRE, each multicast packet is encapsulated in a GRE header [9]. Thus the layer 4 information is hidden to the routers connecting the end-points of the tunnel.…”

GRE Encapsulated Multicast Probing: A Scalable Technique for Measuring One-Way Loss

“…In addition, we introduce a new inference scheme, identify three configurations where MINC and its variants can be applied, and develop a new EM algorithm for aggregate loss reports. An extended abstract of this work appeared as a poster in Sigmetrics 2007 [12].…”

GRE encapsulated multicast probing

“…In this extended abstract we overview key components of our approach and describe three specific measurement scenarios in which these techniques may be deployed. We point the reader to a full ver- sion of the paper [5] for a detailed description and evaluation. There are three components.…”