Debuglet: Programmable and Verifiable Inter-Domain Network Telemetry

On today's Internet, end-user debugging is largely limited to simple tools such as ping and traceroute, supplemented by purpose-built services such as bandwidth measurement, and website uptime monitors. Unfortunately, these tools do not provide sufficient data to isolate specific network faults, nor do they give the user results that can be validated by external entities. Furthermore, since networks disparately treat measurement packets, as our empirical results confirm, measurement packets need to be indistinguishable from data packets. In this paper, we argue for a distributed network debugging infrastructure and describe Debuglet, a deployable and incentivized architecture that allows inter-domain network debugging using real data packets and user-defined code, which facilitates accurate and flexible measurements of the network performance experienced by data packets. We implement the Debuglet system, and demonstrate its feasibility by deploying it on a network testbed, evaluating its measurement accuracy, and analyzing its deployment costs.