Section: New Results

Characterizing ICMP Rate Limitation on Routers

Contributors: Chadi Barakat and Ricardo Ravaioli.

In the last decade, path discovery has been extensively covered in the literature. In its simplest form, it generally works by sending probes that expire along the path from a host to a destination. It is also known that network administrators often configure their routers to limit the amount of ICMP replies sent, a common practice typically referred to as ICMP rate limitation. In this contribution we attempt to characterize the responsiveness of routers to expiring ICMP echo-request packets. Our contribution is twofold: first, we provide a detailed analysis of how routers are most commonly configured to respond to expiring packets; next, we show that for the vast majority of routers the measured round-trip time is not affected by the probing rate. This contribution is published in ICC'2015  [21] . It is the result of a collaboration with the SIGNET group at I3S in the context of a PhD thesis funded by the UCN@SOPHIA Labex.