6 - Measurement Design for Boolean Network Tomography

Summary

Based on the identifiability measures for Boolean network tomography presented in Chapter 5, this chapter addresses the follow-up question of how to design the measurement system to optimize the identifiability measure of interest, with a focus on the placement of monitoring nodes.Depending on the mechanism to collect measurements, the problem is divided into (1) monitor placement, (2) beacon placement, and (3) monitoring-aware service placement, where the first approach requires monitoring nodes at both endpoints of each measurement path, the second approach requires a monitoring node only at one of the endpoints of each measurement path, and the third approach requires each measurement path to be the default routing path between a client and a server. As many of such problems are NP-hard, the focus is put on establishing the hardness of the optimal solution and developing polynomial-time suboptimal algorithms with performance guarantees. The chapter also covers a suite of path construction problems addressing how to construct or select measurement paths to optimize the tradeoff between identifiability and probing cost.