Experimenting with alternative path tracing solutions

Tracing Internet paths is essential for gathering knowledge about the complex, heterogeneous, highly dynamic, and largely opaque eco-system of networks the Internet is. Currently, only two practical solutions are available: (i) equipping packets with the Record Route IP option to register addresses of the traversed routers; (ii) eliciting ICMP Time Exceeded messages by limiting the Time-to-Live of the injected packets. In this paper, we investigate three alternative path tracing solutions eliciting ICMP Parameter Problem (PP) messages from the network through the injection of malformed packets. After having introduced them, we describe the experimental results of a first campaign aiming at evaluating their ability to collect replies from the traversed routers. Finally, thanks to a large-scale multi-vantage points measurement campaign, we evaluate the ability of the most promising ICMP PP-based solution to discover interfaces and routers not discovered by Paris-Traceroute Multipath Detection Algorithm (MDA). Experimental results (a) confirm the ability of this novel path tracing solution to report interfaces and routers that are not reported by the state of the art tools and also (b) uncover the scenarios in which this new solution appears more helpful.