A Low-Cost, Distributed and Conflict-Aware Measurement Method for Overlay Network Services Utilizing Local Information Exchange

Tien Hoang DINH  Go HASEGAWA  Masayuki MURATA  

Publication
IEICE TRANSACTIONS on Communications   Vol.E96-B   No.2   pp.459-469
Publication Date: 2013/02/01
Online ISSN: 1745-1345
DOI: 10.1587/transcom.E96.B.459
Print ISSN: 0916-8516
Type of Manuscript: Special Section PAPER (Special Section on Quality of Communication Services Improving Quality of Life)
Category: 
Keyword: 
overlay networks,  network measurement,  measurement conflict,  distributed measurement method,  information exchange,  

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Summary: 
Measuring network resource information, including available bandwidth, propagation delay, and packet loss ratio, is an important task for efficient operation of overlay network services. Although measurement accuracy can be enhanced by frequent measurements, performing measurements with high frequency can cause measurement conflict problem that increases the network load and degrades measurement accuracy. In this paper, we propose a low-cost, distributed and conflict-aware measurement method that reduces measurement conflicts while maintaining high measurement accuracy. The main idea is that the overlay node exchanges the route information and the measurement results with its neighboring overlay nodes while decreasing the measurement frequency. This means our method trades the overhead of conducting measurements for the overhead of information exchange to enhance measurement accuracy. Simulation results show that the relative error in the measurement results of our method can be decreased by half compared with the existing method when the total measurement overheads of both methods are equal. We also confirm that exchanging measurement results contributes more to the enhancement of measurement accuracy than performing measurements.