DTS: A decentralized tracing system

Abstract

A new generation of widely distributed systems to measure the Internet topology at the interface level is currently being deployed. Cooperation between monitors in these systems is required in order to avoid over-consumption of network resources. This paper proposes an architecture for a distributed topology measurement (DTM) system that, for the first time, decentralizes probing information. The key idea of our proposal is that, by utilizing a shared database as a communication method among monitors and taking advantage of the characteristics of the Doubletree algorithm, we can get rid of a specific control point, and a DTM system can be constructed in a decentralized manner. In this paper, we describe our implementation of a DTM, called Decentralized Tracing System (DTS). Decentralization within DTS is achieved using various distributed hash tables (DHTs), each one being dedicated to a particular plane (i.e., control or data). We also provide preliminary evaluation results. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2009.