Avoiding traceroute anomalies with Paris traceroute

Abstract

International audienceTraceroute is widely used, from the diagnosis of network problems to the assemblage of internet maps. However, there are a few serious problems with this tool, in particu-lar due to the presence of load balancing routers in the net-work. This paper describes a number of anomalies that arise in nearly all traceroute-based measurements. We categorize them as "loops", "cycles", and "diamonds". We provide a new publicly-available traceroute, called Paris traceroute, which controls packet header contents to obtain a more pre-cise picture of the actual routes that packets follow. This new tool allows us to find conclusive explanations for some of the anomalies, and to suggest possible causes for others