Scheduling algorithms for conducting conflict-free measurements in overlay networks

Network monitoring is essential to the correct and efficient operation of ISP networks and the kind of applications they support, and active measurement is a key design problem in network monitoring. Unfortunately, almost all active probing algorithms ignore the measurement conflict problem: Active measurements conflict with each other – due to the nature of these measurements, the associated overhead, and the network topology – which leads to reporting incorrect results. In this paper, we consider the problem of scheduling periodic QoS measurement tasks in overlay networks. We first show that this problem is NP-hard, and then propose two conflict-aware scheduling algorithms for uniform and non-uniform tasks whose goal is to maximize the number of measurement tasks that can run concurrently, based on a well-known approximation algorithm. We incorporate topological information to devise a topology-aware scheduling algorithm that reduces the number of time slots required to produce a feasible measurement schedule. Also, we study the conflict-causing overlap among overlay paths using various real-life Internet topologies of the two major service carriers in the US. Experiments conducted using the PlanetLab testbed confirm that measurement conflict is a real issue that needs to be addressed. Simulation results show that our algorithms achieve at least 25% better schedulability over an existing algorithm. Finally, we discuss various practical considerations, and identify several interesting research problems in this context.