mPlane: An Architecture for Scalable Fault Localization

Customers are increasingly demanding service-level guarantees from ISPs. ISPs use active probes for monitoring network health and use tomography approaches to localize any end-to-end problems observed, which are typically postulated as under constrained problems, and hence, often limited in accuracy. Active probes are also fundamentally unscalable; operators cannot afford to inject them at high frequencies. The authors present architecture, mPlane, which addresses these problems. The key idea in mPlane is to break paths into segments consisting of router forwarding paths and links, and conduct measurements on a per-segment basis. Node measurements are obtained through scalable high-fidelity hardware primitives, while the link measurements are conducted using segment-level active probes at low frequencies.