Link stress reduction in topology-aware overlay path monitoring

Overlay networks often employ end-to-end probes to track network performance. These probes are routed through overlay paths, which usually overlap at the overlay level. In addition, two seemingly disjoint overlay paths may share many physical links at the IP level, causing high link stress. Several monitoring algorithms have been proposed to reduce the overall probing overhead. Surprisingly, they do not address the associated problem of high link stress. The high link stress presents an additional load on the network links, which could cause congestion, delay, and measurement conflict. In this paper, we aim at reducing the link stress associated with probing algorithms by introducing the concept of Internal Probing, where readily available IP-level topology information is used in conjunction with the overlay topology to reduce the link stress on highly shared path segments. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme can reduce the link stress by up to 30%.