4 research outputs found
A Network Coding Approach to Loss Tomography
Network tomography aims at inferring internal network characteristics based
on measurements at the edge of the network. In loss tomography, in particular,
the characteristic of interest is the loss rate of individual links and
multicast and/or unicast end-to-end probes are typically used. Independently,
recent advances in network coding have shown that there are advantages from
allowing intermediate nodes to process and combine, in addition to just
forward, packets. In this paper, we study the problem of loss tomography in
networks with network coding capabilities. We design a framework for estimating
link loss rates, which leverages network coding capabilities, and we show that
it improves several aspects of tomography including the identifiability of
links, the trade-off between estimation accuracy and bandwidth efficiency, and
the complexity of probe path selection. We discuss the cases of inferring link
loss rates in a tree topology and in a general topology. In the latter case,
the benefits of our approach are even more pronounced compared to standard
techniques, but we also face novel challenges, such as dealing with cycles and
multiple paths between sources and receivers. Overall, this work makes the
connection between active network tomography and network coding
Active Topology Inference using Network Coding
Our goal is to infer the topology of a network when (i) we can send probes
between sources and receivers at the edge of the network and (ii) intermediate
nodes can perform simple network coding operations, i.e., additions. Our key
intuition is that network coding introduces topology-dependent correlation in
the observations at the receivers, which can be exploited to infer the
topology. For undirected tree topologies, we design hierarchical clustering
algorithms, building on our prior work. For directed acyclic graphs (DAGs),
first we decompose the topology into a number of two-source, two-receiver
(2-by-2) subnetwork components and then we merge these components to
reconstruct the topology. Our approach for DAGs builds on prior work on
tomography, and improves upon it by employing network coding to accurately
distinguish among all different 2-by-2 components. We evaluate our algorithms
through simulation of a number of realistic topologies and compare them to
active tomographic techniques without network coding. We also make connections
between our approach and alternatives, including passive inference, traceroute,
and packet marking
Active topology inference using network coding
Our goal, in this paper, is to infer the topology of a network when (i) we can send probes between sources and receivers at the edge of the network and (ii) intermediate nodes can perform simple network coding operations, i.e., additions. Our key intuition is that network coding introduces topology-dependent correlation in the observations at the receivers, which can be exploited to infer the topology. For undirected tree topologies, we design hierarchical clustering algorithms, building on our prior work in [24]. For directed acyclic graphs (DAGs), first we decompose the topology into a number of two source, two receiver (2-by-2) subnetwork components and then we merge these components to reconstruct the topology. Our approach for DAGs builds on prior work on tomography [36], and improves upon it by employing network coding to accurately distinguish among all different 2-by-2 components. We evaluate our algorithms through simulation of a number of realistic topologies and compare them to active tomographic techniques without network coding. We also make connections between our approach and other alternatives, including passive inference, traceroute, and packet marking