A Network Coding Approach to Network Monitoring (Invited Paper)

Network Monitoring is a challenging problem that has received a lot of attention in the Internet community, particularly in the context of overlay networks. Independently, recent advances in Network Coding have shown that it is possible to increase network capacity and better share the available resources by allowing intermediate nodes to perform processing operations, in addition to just forwarding packets. In this work, we propose the use of Network Coding techniques to improve Network Monitoring. As a specific application, we use our approach for the well-known problem of network tomography, and in particular for inferring link loss rates from end-to-end measurements. We demonstrate that our approach can decrease the bandwidth used by probes, improve the accuracy of estimation, and decrease the complexity of selecting paths or trees to send probes. Overall, we argue that the use of Network Coding techniques shows great promise for improving several aspects of monitoring in overlay networks.