Robust monitoring of link delays and faults in IP networks

In this paper, we develop failure-resilient techniques for monitoring link delays and faults in a service provider or enterprise IP network. Our two-phased approach attempts to minimize both the monitoring infrastructure costs as well as the additional traffic due to probe messages. In the first phase of our approach, we compute the locations of a minimal set of monitoring stations such that all network links are covered, even in the presence of several link failures. Subsequently, in the second phase, we compute a minimal set of probe messages that are transmitted by the stations to measure link delays and isolate network faults. We show that both the station selection problem as well as the probe assignment problem are NP-hard. We then propose greedy approximation algorithms that achieve a logarithmic approximation factor for the station selection problem and a constant factor for the probe assignment problem. These approximation ratios are provably very close to the best possible bounds for any algorithm.