Towards efficient large-scale VPN monitoring and diagnosis under operational constraints

Continuous monitoring and diagnosis of network performance are of crucial importance for the Internet access service and virtual private network (VPN) service providers. Various operational constraints, which are crucial to the practice, are largely ignored in previous monitoring system designs, or are simply replaced with load balancing problems which do not work for real heterogeneous networks. Given these real-world challenges, in this paper, we design a VScope monitoring system with the following contributions. First, we design a greedy-assisted linear programming algorithm to select as few monitors as possible that can monitor the whole network under the operational constraints. Secondly, VScope takes a multi-round measurement approach to further reduce monitors deployment/management cost, by scheduling the path measurements in different rounds under the operational constraints. Evaluations based on several real VPN topologies from a tier-1 ISP as well as some other synthetic topologies demonstrate that VScope is promising to solve the aforementioned challenges.