Dynamic Network Delay Cartography

Abstract

Path delays in IP networks are important metrics, required by network operators for assessment, planning, and fault diagnosis. Monitoring delays of all source-destination pairs in a large network is however challenging and wasteful of resources. The present paper advocates a spatio-temporal Kalman filtering approach to construct network-wide delay maps using measurements on only a few paths. The proposed network cartography framework allows efficient tracking and prediction of delays by relying on both topological as well as historical data. Optimal paths for delay measurement are selected in an online fashion by leveraging the notion of submodularity. The resulting predictor is optimal in the class of linear predictors, and outperforms competing alternatives on real-world datasets.