Zone recovery methodology for probe-subset selection in end-to-end network monitoring

To predict the delay between a source and a destination as well as to identify anomalies in a network, it is possible to monitor the network continuously by sending probes between all sources and destinations. However, it is of prime importance to keep the number of probes to a minimum and yet be able to predict the delays and identify anomalies reasonably. We state and solve a mathematical programming problem, namely the zone recovery methodology (ZRM), to select an optimal subset of ping-like probes to monitor networks where the topology and routing information are not known. A polynomial-time heuristic is developed. The application of ZRM on randomly generated topologies yielded 73.55% reduction in the number of monitored paths on average. In other words, networks can be successfully monitored using only 26.45% of the available probes. Moreover, the performance of ZRM increases (percentage of the monitored paths decreases) as the size of the topology increases.