Towards DisNETPerf: a Distributed Internet Paths Performance Analyzer

For more than 25 years now, traceroute has demonstrated its supremacy for network-path measurement, becoming the most widely used Internet path diagnosis tool today. A major limitation of traceroute when the destination is not controllable by the user is its inability to measure reverse paths, i.e., the path from a destination back to the source. Proposed techniques to address this issue rely on IP address spoofing, which might lead to security concerns. In this paper we introduce and evaluate DisNETPerf, a new tool for locating probes that are the closest to a distant server. Those probes are then used to collect data from the server point-of-view to the service user for path performance monitoring and troubleshooting purposes. We propose two techniques for probe location, and demonstrate that the reverse path can be measured with very high accuracy in certain scenarios.