Improving the Reliability of Internet Paths with One-hop Source Routing

Recent work has focused on increasing availability in the face of Internet path failures. To date, proposed solutions have relied on complex routing and pathmonitoring schemes, trading scalability for availability among a relatively small set of hosts. This paper proposes a simple, scalable approach to recover from Internet path failures. Our contributions are threefold. First, we conduct a broad measurement study of Internet path failures on a collection of 3,153 Internet destinations consisting of popular Web servers, broadband hosts, and randomly selected nodes. We monitored these destinations from 67 PlanetLab vantage points over a period of seven days, and found availabilities ranging from 99.6% for servers to 94.4% for broadband hosts. When failures do occur, many appear too close to the destination (e.g., last-hop and end-host failures) to be mitigated through alternative routing techniques of any kind. Second, we show that for the failures that can be addressed through routing, a simple, scalable technique, called one-hop source routing, can achieve close to the maximum benefit available with very low overhead. When a path failure occurs, our scheme attempts to recover from it by routing indirectly through a small set of randomly chosen intermediaries. Third, we implemented and deployed a prototype onehop source routing infrastructure on PlanetLab. Over a three day period, we repeatedly fetched documents from 982 popular Internet Web servers and used one-hop source routing to attempt to route around the failures we observed. Our results show that our prototype successfully recovered from 56% of network failures. However, we also found a large number of server failures that cannot be addressed through alternative routing. Our research demonstrates that one-hop source routing is easy to implement, adds negligible overhead, and achieves close to the maximum benefit available to indirect routing schemes, without the need for path monitoring, history, or a-priori knowledge of any kind.