Efficient Internet Mapping in the Presence of Network Load Balancers

Traceroute is a popular tool that has many applications in network troubleshooting and mapping. We propose in this paper a six-step methodology for creating a more efficient profile-based probing strategy. The basic idea behind our methodology is examining how often routing changes occur in the routing path at the different times of the day. This helps in giving a high probing weight for parts of the routing path that change frequently while lower probing weight is assigned for parts that change rarely in the different time periods of the day. Our experimental results show that our approach exploits regularities in the routing changes and achieves great savings in the number of probes. In fact, our approach achieves a 66% reduction in the number of probes compared to classical Traceroute that is launched periodically. This is an important enhancement for systems that scan the Internet repeatedly. Furthermore, we show another enhancement that cuts scanning time by 90%. This is achieved by scanning multiple hop levels at the same time after marking the probes in order to match them with the received responses.