Efficient probe selection for fault localization using the property of submodularity

As the computer network increasingly grows larger and more complex, fault diagnosis has become a challenging task. Active probing is an efficient tool for fault localization. By implementing some test programs and analyzing the results, active‐probing‐based techniques can perform diagnosis efficiently and adaptively. Because probes may generate additional traffic overhead, it is important to appropriately select small number of probes to reach the desired diagnostic capability. However, the computation of probe selection problem in such environment is extremely expensive. Most of the past works purchase the speed at the cost of diagnostic accuracy. In this paper, we first verify that probe selection problem satisfies the property of submodularity. Then we take the use of the property and develop a submodularity‐based selection algorithm with following novel features: (i) it is cost effective, failure resistant and more accurate; (ii) it could deal with the uncertainties about the network structures and the observations; and (iii) it can select the required probes in near‐linear time. Finally, we implement submodularity‐based selection algorithm and other two representative probe selection algorithms (bounded path enumeration approximation algorithm and greedy search algorithm) on different settings of networks. The results have shown how the new algorithm outperforms the former two algorithms. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.