Intrinsic monitoring within an IPv6 network: mapping node information to network paths

In this paper, we describe a path-based intrinsic monitoring protocol that can efficiently associate SNMP based MIB information to a network path within a single administrative domain. Our method is based on intrinsic monitoring, a lightweight metric collection protocol that makes use of the IPv6 Router Alert hop-by-hop option. The main advantage of our approach is that operators can rapidly associate node specific MIB metrics to paths within the network. This can dramatically reduce the overhead associated with correlating node specific MIB information to topology information and network paths. It provides the network operator with a tool that can be used to focus on monitoring individual paths in the network, where the nodes along the path are not known beforehand. We compare the performance overhead associated with our proposed approach to conventional SNMP get/response message exchanges. The results demonstrate a dramatic reduction in the collection time of node specific metrics. Our approach also implicitly relates collected metrics to the network path, thus removing the need to correlate metrics to topology and path information.