Probe Station Placement for Robust Monitoring of Networks

We address the problem of selecting probe station locations from where probes can be sent to monitor all the nodes in the network. Probe station placement involves instrumentation overhead. Hence, the number of probe stations should be minimal to reduce the deployment cost. Also, probe station placement should be such that the network can be monitored even in the presence of failures. We present algorithms to select locations of probe stations so that the entire network can be monitored for computing various performance metrics.We aim to find a minimal set of probe station nodes so as to minimize the instrumentation overhead. The algorithm presented provides robust monitoring in presence of node failures. We then present algorithms to make the solution resilient to probe station failures, and to deal with weakly connected nodes. We provide an experimental evaluation of the proposed algorithms through simulation results.