High-Speed Traceroute Method for Large Scale Network

Abstract

As the scale of IP networks becomes larger, network management becomes more complex and the turn-around time of fault recovery is longer. This is because there are problems in adopting current essential tools for network management, such as a ping, Traceroute, and Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) to large-scale IP networks. We have been investigating ways to improve the performance of these tools, and proposed a high-speed ping and showed its advantage. For this paper, we propose and evaluate a high-speed traceroute method for collecting topology information from large scale networks. Our method is used to increase the speed of network topology collection to reduce topology-searching packets, which are sent in excess using the current traceroute method, as well as adopting our high-speed ping technology. In terms of reducing packets, our method can be used to send these searching packets to end points first (with the current traceroute method, they are sent last), detect nodes on the shared routes to those end points, and send searching packets to these nodes only. By implementing the above, we show that our proposed method can be used to reduce searching packets by 70% and the time to collect topology information by 95% compared with the current traceroute.