PlanetSeer: Internet Path Failure Monitoring and Characterization in Wide-Area Services

Detecting network path anomalies generally requires examining large volumes of traffic data to find misbehavior. We observe that wide-area services, such as peerto-peer systems and content distribution networks, exhibit large traffic volumes, spread over large numbers of geographically-dispersed endpoints. This makes them ideal candidates for observing wide-area network behavior. Specifically, we can combine passive monitoring of wide-area traffic to detect anomalous network behavior, with active probes from multiple nodes to quantify and characterize the scope of these anomalies. This approach provides several advantages over other techniques: (1) we obtain more complete and finergrained views of failures since the wide-area nodes already provide geographically diverse vantage points; (2) we incur limited additional measurement cost since most active probing is initiated when passive monitoring detects oddities; and (3) we detect failures at a much higher rate than other researchers ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2004
• Where: OSDI
• Authors: Ming Zhang, Chi Zhang, Vivek S. Pai, Larry L. Peterson, Randolph Y. Wang
• Keywords: Large Traffic Volumes, Operating System, OSDI 2004, Wide-area Network Behavior, Wide-area Traffic