GRE Encapsulated Multicast Probing: A Scalable Technique for Measuring One-Way Loss

Internet service providers increasingly wish to monitor the performance of customer traffic within their networks. This paper addresses the problem of scalably performing one-way loss measurements across specific network paths. Our solution addresses the issue of scale by exploiting measurement features of the deployed network infrastructure to a large degree. There are three components. Firstly, GRE tunneling is used to control the path followed by measurement traffic in the network. Secondly, innovative probing methods, coupled with standard measurement capabilities, such as NetFlow, are used to isolate the performance of groups of measurement packets. Thirdly, we exploit and extend tomographic inference methods in order to extract the performance of probe traffic on customer paths within the network. This combination yields a powerful yet lightweight method to determine customer performance within the network.