Discovering Routers in Load-balanced Paths

Abstract

peer reviewedUsually, a set of Traceroute measurements collected for a large amount of target IPs contain one or several route hops at which the IP interfaces vary from one measurement to another. These variations occur even if several measurements share the same length and the same last hops. This is likely a consequence of load balancing, a traffic engineering policy which aims at sharing the load to ensure quality of service. In this paper, we consider the problem of conducting alias resolution on IP interfaces discovered via Traceroute and which are involved in load balancing. By conducting alias resolution in such a context, we want to verify if the IP interfaces involved in load balancing belong to unique routers, and more broadly, how relevant is alias resolution in this context. To do so, we use a slightly edited version of TreeNET, a topology discovery tool which relies on a tree-like structure based on Traceroute measurements to map a target domain. The upgraded TreeNET along the measurements described in this paper are both freely available online