Mitigating interference in a network measurement service

Shared measurement services offer key advantages over conventional ad-hoc techniques for network monitoring. A measurement service may receive measurement requests concurrently from different applications and network administrators. These measurement requests are often served by injecting active network measurement traffic between two hosts. Two active measurements are said to interfere when the probe packets of one measurement tool are viewed as network traffic by the other. This may lead to faulty measurement readings. In this paper, we model the measurement interference problem, and show how to schedule measurement tasks to reduce interference and hence increase measurement accuracy. We propose twelve computationally tractable algorithms that decrease the total completion time (makespan) of measurement tasks, while avoiding interference. Our evaluation shows that the algorithm we refer to as Largest Area First, Busiest Node First - Earliest Interval Schedule (LAFBNF-EIS) has a mean makespan of about 5% more than the theoretical lower bound over our set of measurement workloads.