Abstract :
[en] Segment Routing (SR), an advanced source routing mechanism, is a promising technology with a wide range of applications that has already gained traction from hardware vendors, network operators, and researchers alike. However, despite the abundance of activity surrounding SR, little is known about how to gauge \sr deployment and its usage by operators.
This paper introduces a methodology, called Advanced Revelation of Segment Routing Tunnels (AReST), for revealing the presence of SR with MPLS as forwarding plane (SR-MPLS). AReST relies on standard measurement tools, like traceroute and fingerprinting, and post-processes the collected data for highlighting evidence of SR-MPLS. Our results show that AReST is efficient in revealing the presence of SR-MPLS in various autonomous systems, obtaining a perfect precision on our ground truth directly obtained from an operator. We also make a preliminary characterization of the SR-MPLS deployment and show that it is commonly deployed within Content, Transit, and Tier-1 providers and, occasionally, in interworking with classic MPLS. The data collected, as well as our source code, is available to the research community.
