A distributed measurement method for reducing measurement conflict frequency in overlay networks

In overlay networks, in order to obtain accurate measurement results, it is important to solve the measurement conflict problem : the measurement tasks for overlapping paths conflict with each other. In this paper, we propose a measurement method which reduces the number of measurement conflicts, without centralized control in measurement tasks scheduling. In this method, each overlay node uses traceroute to get path information to other overlay nodes and exchanges it with nearby overlay nodes to estimate path overlaps. Based on the number of overlapping paths, the overlay node calculates an appropriate measurement frequency and a measurement timing to minimize the probability of measurement conflicts occurring among overlapping paths. Furthermore, the overlay node exchanges measurement results with a small number of overlay nodes to statistically obtain more accurate measurement results. Simulation results show that when the density of the overlay nodes (the ratio of the number of overlay nodes to the number of routers) is greater than 0.3, our method can run twice as many measurement tasks as existing methods without measurement conflict.