PathCrawler: Automatic harvesting web infra-structure

As network topologies have grown in size and complexity, it is becoming a daunting task for network administrators to keep track the capacity dimensioning of newly installed web-servers within a single or multiple providers. In fact, monitor capacity dimensioning is not a trivial activity since network state changes rather frequently, in particular, in academic environments. In this paper, we describe estimation algorithms and the software architecture of an efficient network management suite to automatically mine path capacity and minimum delays from a venture point to a set of observed web servers. The principle of the suite is based on packet dispersion techniques and repetitive non-intrusive measurements. We provide analytical insights, simulation results and some real case studies where we argument about the correctness, accuracy and usefulness of the suite in the context of management and operation of complex IP based networks.