Distinguishing persistent failures from transient losses

Network tomography is a promising technique to identify the location of of IP faults. The goal of tomography is to infer the status of network internal characteristics based on end-to-end observations. In particular, binary tomography identifies the set of failed links from end-to-end path meausrments. Upon detecting the failure of one or more of the monitored paths, a monitor sends its measurements to a central coordinator. The coordinator then runs the binary tomography algorithm, which takes as input the topology of the network and the status (i.e., up or down) of all monitored paths and finds the minimum set of links that explain the observations.