| Paris Traceroute |
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Traceroute is a tool commonly used to discover Internet topology at the IP level. It has been shown to introduce measurement artifacts in the presence of routers that use load-balancing features, which leads to the discovery of inaccurate and incomplete paths. Such failures in correctly mapping the underlying topology may mislead operators during problem diagnosis and result in erroneous Internet maps. Paris Traceroute has been proposed as an alternative by the UPMC team to perform more accurate measurements in this context. By controlling packet headers, it allows the discovery of the actual routes that probe packets follow when going through per-flow load balancers. Such balancers are the most frequently used equipment used for load-balancing. Paris Traceroute is also able to detect the presence of other less common balancers, such as per-packet load balancers. Several scientific projects have built on this tool since its creation, and it has for example been deployed within OneLab by the DIMES, ETOMIC and TopHat projects. The source code of Paris Traceroute is available as free software, and a package has been integrated in the Debian distribution. For further details, see the following publications: B. Augustin, X. Cuvellier, B. Orgogozo, F. Viger, T. Friedman, M. Latapy, C. Magnien, R. Teixeira. Avoiding traceroute anomalies with Paris traceroute. Internet Measurement Conference, October 2006. B. Augustin, R. Teixeira, T. Friedman. Measuring Load-balanced Paths in the Internet. Internet Measurement Conference, October 2007. 
A more detailed description and the source code of Paris Traceroute can be found on the website: http://www.paris-traceroute.net |
