Minimally invasive monitoring of path quality
AssigneeRiverbed Technology, Inc.
InventorJohn G. Fitzgibbon
Life of this patent
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Abstract
Systems and techniques are described for performing minimally invasive monitoring of path quality in a network. Specifically, path quality requests and measurements can be piggy-backed on the data traffic that is flowing through a secure connection between two network nodes. For example, path quality requests and measurements can be inserted into the TFC padding field of IP/ESP packets that are being communicated between two IPsec devices. The disclosed embodiments ensure that the number/frequency of measurements increases/decreases naturally in proportion to the amount of traffic flowing, and that the measurement data does not get differential treatment in the network as they are intrinsically bound to the data packets being monitored.
Claims20
A method for monitoring path quality, the method comprising:
- a source node adding a path quality record to a Traffic Flow Confidentiality (TFC) padding field of a first Internet Protocol (IP)/Encapsulated Security Payload (ESP) packet;
- the source node sending the first IP/ESP packet to a destination node;
- the source node receiving a second IP/ESP packet from the destination node;
- the source node extracting a response path quality record from a TFC padding field of the second IP/ESP packet;
- and
- the source node determining a path quality metric based on the response path quality record.
A non-transitory computer-readable storage medium storing instructions that, when executed by a processor in a source node, cause the source node to perform a method for monitoring path quality, the method comprising:
- adding a path quality record to a Traffic Flow Confidentiality (TFC) padding field of a first Internet Protocol (IP)/Encapsulated Security Payload (ESP) packet;
- sending the first IP/ESP packet to a destination node;
- receiving a second IP/ESP packet from the destination node;
- extracting a response path quality record from a TFC padding field of the second IP/ESP packet;
- and
- determining a path quality metric based on the response path quality record.
A non-transitory computer-readable storage medium storing instructions that, when executed by a processor in a destination node, cause the destination node to perform a method for monitoring path quality, the method comprising:
- receiving a first Internet Protocol (IP)/Encapsulated Security Payload (ESP) packet from a source node;
- extracting a path quality record from a Traffic Flow Confidentiality (TFC) padding field of the first IP/ESP packet;
- using the path quality record to determine path quality measurement data corresponding to the network path and QoS class;
- creating the response path quality record, wherein the response path quality record includes the path quality measurement data;
- adding the response path quality record to the TFC padding field of a second IP/ESP packet;
- and
- sending the second IP/ESP packet to the source node.
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.