Building Out the Basics with Hoplets

Prathy Raman, Marcel Flores

Abstract: Maintaining a performant Internet service is simplified when operators are able to develop an understanding of the path between the service and its end users. A key piece of operational knowledge comes from understanding when i) segments of a path contribute to a significant portion of the path’s delay ii) when these segments occur across end users. We propose hoplets, an abstraction for describing delay increases between an end-user and a content provider built on traceroutes. We present a mechanism for measuring and comparing hoplets to determine when they describe the same underlying network features. Using this mechanism, we construct a methodology to enable wide scale measurement that requires only limited contextual data. We demonstrate the efficacy of hoplets, showing their ability to effectively describe round-trip-time increases observed from a global content delivery network. Additionally, we perform an Internet-scale measurement and analysis of the hoplets observed from this infrastructure, exploring their nature and topological features where we find that nearly 20% of bottlenecks occurred along paths with no visible alternative. Finally, we demonstrate the generality of the system by detecting a likely network misconfiguration using data from RIPE Atlas.