Computer Science

Colloquium Details

Paris Traceroute: An Improved Traceroute

Abstract

Traceroute is a utility program that accompanies the operating system in most networked computers today. It provides an indication of the route that packets follow in the Internet when traveling from a source to a destination. We found that the standard version of Traceroute is broken, in that it often yields odd measurement artifacts instead of a faithful depiction of the network path. We found that this is due to an unfortunate interaction between a probe identification mechanism used by Traceroute and the algorithms that routers use to balance traffic load across their outgoing links. We have produced a corrected version of Traceroute, called Paris Traceroute, that does not suffer from this problem. This talk will describe Paris Traceroute and the measurements that we have used it to obtain. Note for Masters students: There is an opportunity for a Masters project with significant impact in packaging the open source Paris Traceroute code for wide scale release in Linux distributions and elsewhere.

Biography

Timur Friedman is a Maitre de Conferences (assistant professor) at UPMC Paris Universitas in Paris. He is a frequent visitor to the University of Oregon Computer Science Department. He earned his Doctorate in Computer Science in 2001 from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He is the Project Director for the European Commission's OneLab project (http://www.onelab.eu/), and Director General of PlanetLab Europe (http://www.planet-lab.eu/).