Design and Implementation of TraceMan Networking, Analyzer, and Visualization Capabilities

Traceroute-based techniques are used to as a diagnostic method for displaying the route (path) and measuring transit delays of packets across an Internet Protocol (IP) network. For example, traceroute-based tools can identify — or at least provide a good hint — which router along a network path is unavailable or having performance difficulties.

There are many tools [1;10], that measure and/or identify bandwidth bottlenecks along the path of two nodes in the Internet. Each of these tools use different techniques to measure and identify it, even though all of them use a traceroute-based method to identify the location of which is the “problematic” router in terms of bandwidth.

TraceMan (A Traceroute-Measurement Manipulation and Storage Tool) [12] is a tool written in Java to store and manipulate traceroute measurements. TraceMan is an implementation of RFC 5388 [11]. The RFC proposes a standard data model for traceroute configuration and traceroute measurement data. In the current implementation state, TraceMan implements the RFC data model and provides the possibility to store traceroute data in an SQL database. Also, XML and JSON export/import features provide simple data exchange between TraceMan nodes. Even though the TraceMan Core package was already published in a stable version, the Networking package is not stable and missing functionalities. Moreover, TraceMan does not provide yet any mechanism to reason the router facing problems during a monitoring period, nor any way to visualize the monitoring map related to the monitored service.

The RFC 5388 has a data model where is possible to specify measurement requests. Each request can be executed generating some output (measurement results). TraceMan implements such model, enabling the data to be manipulated and stored. However, the current version of TraceMan does not fully implement requests. In addition, once traceroute measurements are stored, TraceMan does not present a visualization capability, also pointing where (in the router level) a round-trip-time (RTT) problem is present.

Therefore, this thesis shall extend the TraceMan software by developing a Networking and Visualization package, and also, implementing a component that can analyze the traceroute measurement data to identify possible problems related to round-trip-time.

References:

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[11] IETF RFC 5388: Information Model and XML Data Model for Traceroute Measurements. Available at: http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5388 . Last visited on: May, 2012.
[12] TraceMan: A Traceroute-Measurement Manipulation and Storage Tool. Available at: http://traceman.csg.uzh.ch . last visited on: Oct, 2012.