Multi-hop packet tracking for experimental facilities

The Internet has become a complex system with increasing numbers of end-systems, applications, protocols and types of networks. Although we have a good understanding of how data is transferred over the network we cannot observe what happens with our data after sending and before receiving it - how packets traverse through the network and with which QoS characteristics remains unknown. Towards this objective we have developed a multi-hop packet tracking system intended to be used in experimental facilities, such as PlanetLab, where we have made our first tests. This paper describes our packet tracking realization and the results from our prototype implementation.