Traceroute of Application Flows

Service traceroute is a tool that allows the discovery of individual application flows paths. Service traceroute leverages the ideas from paratrace, Sidecar, and 0trace, to passively listen to application traffic to then issue traceroute probes that pretend to be part of the application flow. Service traceroute extends this idea to work for modern Internet services and support tracing of multiple concurrent TCP flows, as well as for UDP flows. Service traceroute is available both as command-line tool and library versions.

Service traceroute: Tracing Paths of Application Flows

Abstract. Traceroute is often used to help diagnose when users experience issues with Internet applications or services. Unfortunately, probes issued by classic traceroute tools differ from application traffic and hence can be treated differently by routers that perform load balancing and middleboxes within the network. This paper proposes a new traceroute tool, called Service traceroute. Service traceroute leverages the idea from paratrace, which passively listens to application traffic to then issue traceroute probes that pretend to be part of the application flow. We extend this idea to work for modern Internet services with support for identifying the flows to probe automatically, for tracing of multiple concurrent flows, and for UDP flows. We implement command-line and library versions of Service traceroute, which we release as open source. This paper also presents an evaluation of Service traceroute when tracing paths traversed by Web downloads from the top-1000 Alexa websites and by video sessions from Twitch and Youtube. Our evaluation shows that Service traceroute has no negative effect on application flows. Our comparison with Paris traceroute shows that a typical traceroute tool that launches a new flow to the same destination discovers different paths than when embedding probes in the application flow in a significant fraction of experiments (from 40% to 50% of our experiments in PlanetLab Europe).

Resources

The research paper was accepted to PAM 2019.

You can download the source and datasets here

Citation bibtex

@inproceedings{morandi2019service,
  title={Service traceroute: tracing paths of application flows},
  author={Morandi, Ivan and Bronzino, Francesco and Teixeira, Renata and Sundaresan, Srikanth},
  booktitle={Passive and Active Measurement: 20th International Conference, PAM 2019, Puerto Varas, Chile, March 27--29, 2019, Proceedings 20},
  pages={116--128},
  year={2019},
  organization={Springer}
}