Efficient beacon placement for network tomography

Abstract

Recent interest in using tomography for network monitoring has raised the fundamental issue of whether it is possible to use only a small number of probing nodes (beacons) for monitoring all edges of a network in the presence of dynamic routing. Past work has shown that minimizing the number of beacons is NP-hard, and has provided approximate solutions that may be fairly suboptimal. In this paper, we use a two-pronged approach to compute an efficient beacon set: (i) we formulate the need for, and design algorithms for, computing the set of edges that can be monitored by a beacon under all possible routing states; and (ii) we minimize the number of beacons used to monitor all network edges. We show that the latter problem is NP-complete and use an approximate placement algorithm that yields beacon sets of sizes within 1 + ln(|E|) of the optimal solution, where E is the set of edges to be monitored. Beacon set computations for several Rocketfuel ISP topologies indicate that our algorithm may reduce the number of beacons yielded by past solutions by more than 50%.

Joint optimization of monitor location and network anomaly detection

“…S2 = {P3 (1,4,6), P4 (1,3,6,7,8), P5 (1,2,5,4,7,8)} is an optimal corresponding path set. In the first scenario, the links (1, 3), (3,6) and (7,8) are monitored twice; they belong each to two monitored paths. The deployment of an additional monitor in the second scenario reduces the number of bi-monitored links to one link (6,7).…”

“…In the first scenario, the links (1, 3), (3,6) and (7,8) are monitored twice; they belong each to two monitored paths. The deployment of an additional monitor in the second scenario reduces the number of bi-monitored links to one link (6,7). We conclude that the less monitors are deployed in the network, the more redundant measurements of links we obtain.…”

“…Several works proposed schemes to place as few monitoring devices as possible at strategic locations of the network such that all network links are covered (e.g. [7]- [9]). The works in [1]- [6] addressed the minimization of the overhead of the inference techniques.…”

Probe Station Placement for Robust Monitoring of Networks

“…Many routers frequently disable the source routing option. Authors in [17] and [18] propose placement of monitoring stations that is robust to route changes. Horton and Lopez-Ortiz [17] propose a strategy to use high arity nodes for beacon placement to test for connectivity on all relevant edges of the network.…”

“…Horton and Lopez-Ortiz [17] propose a strategy to use high arity nodes for beacon placement to test for connectivity on all relevant edges of the network. However the beacon set size could be quite large for real ISP topologies [18]. Kumar and Kaur [18] propose an approach for beacon placement by identifying edge sets that can be monitored by a beacon under all possible route configurations.…”