Bound-based Network Tomography for Inferring Interesting Link Metrics

Network tomography is an attractive methodology for inferring internal network states from accumulated path measurements between pairs of monitors. Motivated by previous results that identifying all link metrics can require a large number of monitors, we focus on calculating the performance bounds of a set of interesting links, i.e., bound-based network tomography. We develop an efficient solution to obtain the tightest upper bounds and lower bounds of all interesting links in an arbitrary network with a given set of end-to-end path measurements. Based on this solution, we further propose an algorithm to place new monitors over existing ones such that the bounds of interesting links can be maximally tightened. We theoretically prove the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms. We implement the algorithms and conduct extensive experiments based on real network topologies. Compared with state-of-the- art approaches, our algorithms can achieve 2.2 3.1 times more reduction on the bound interval lengths of all interesting links and reduce the number of placed monitors significantly in various network settings.