Discover multicast network internal characteristics based on Hamming distance

Abstract

One of the important techniques to monitor and control large-scale networks today is to implement only at the end. However end-based control needs to have the knowledge of network internal characteristics. The paper proposes a novel approach to discover network internal characteristics from end-to-end multicast traffic measurements, which requires no support from internal routers. Our approach is based on Hamming distance of sequences on receipt/loss of probe packets maintained at each pair of nodes. As we discuss in this paper, our approach mainly focuses on identification of network internal characteristics of routing topology and loss performance. The simulation shows that the Hamming distance-based approach can discover the routing topology which is more accurate and efficient with a finite number of probe packets than before. The Hamming distance matrix proposed in this paper can also effectively discover the loss performance of the network.