Analysis of false traceroute links in the presence of per-packet load balancing

Load balancing is one major cause of the false traceroute link problem in Internet topology measurements. In this paper, the problem of false traceroute links in the presence of per-packet load balancing is illustrated and analyzed. The false traceroute links in the presence of symmetric and asymmetric per-packet load balancing are analyzed and formulized independently. According to our analysis, traceroue may produce a large number of false links in the context of per-packet load balancing. Furthermore, tracerouting in the presence of asymmetric per-packet load balancing may produce much more false links than tracerouting in the presence of symmetric per-packet load balancing.