Network Tomography of Binary Network Performance Characteristics

In network performance tomography, characteristics of the network interior, such as link loss and packet latency, are inferred from correlated end-to-end measurements. Most work to date is based on exploiting packet level correlations, e.g., of multicast packets or unicast emulations of them. However, these methods are often limited in scope-multicast is not widely deployed-or require deployment of additional hardware or software infrastructure. Some recent work has been successful in reaching a less detailed goal: identifying the lossiest network links using only uncorrelated end-to-end measurements. In this paper, we abstract the properties of network performance that allow this to be done and exploit them with a quick and simple inference algorithm that, with high likelihood, identifies the worst performing links. We give several examples of real network performance measures that exhibit the required properties. Moreover, the algorithm is sufficiently simple that we can analyze its performance explicitly