Neighbor-Cooperative Measurement of Network Path Quality

In the current Internet landscape, a stub autonomous system (AS) could choose from a number of providers and peers to advertise its routes. However, the route selection may not always result in a best choice in terms of end-to-end path performance. Instead of having an AS to monitor all possible paths, we argue that it is much more effective and beneficial for a number of neighboring ASes to cooperate in the path measurement. In this paper, we present a neighbor-cooperative measurement system in which each participating AS conducts measurement using their current routes for the same set of remote endpoints. A collation of the measurement results can help identify and correct poor routes, compare different providers´ network services, and diagnose network performance problems. We report measurement results from an actual deployment involving eight neighboring universities for over a year.