A measurement study on overhead distribution of value-added internet services

During the last two decades, several value-added services (e.g., IP multicast, IP traceback, etc.) have been proposed to extend the functional capabilities of the Internet. Due to the increasing role of these services, there is a need to better understand their impact on the network. In this paper, we present an experimental study on the intersection characteristics of end-to-end Internet paths and trees. We analyze these characteristics to understand the scale and the distribution of “state overhead” that is incurred on the routers by various value-added network services. For the reliability of our analysis, a representative, end-to-end router-level Internet map is essential. Although several maps are available, they are at best insufficient for our analysis. Therefore, in the first part of our work, we exert a measurement study and present an alternative approach to obtain an end-to-end router-level map conforming to our constraints. In the second part, we conduct various experiments using our map and shed some light on the scale and distribution of the state overhead of value-added Internet services in both unicast and multicast environments.