Where the Sidewalk Ends - Extending the Internet AS Graph Using Traceroutes from P2P Users

A Joint AquaLab and LIST Project

News

  • 8/28/2009: Missing links made available (see below).

Motivation and Approach

An accurate Internet topology graph is important in many areas of networking, from deciding ISP business relationships to diagnosing network anomalies. Most Internet mapping efforts have derived the network structure, at the level of interconnected autonomous systems (ASes), from a limited number of either BGP- or traceroute-based data sources. While techniques for charting the topology continue to improve, the number of vantage points continues to shrink relative to the fast-paced growth of the Internet.

This project focuses on revealing the hidden areas of the Internet topology through active measurement from an observation platform that scales with the growing Internet. By leveraging measurements performed by an extension to a popular P2P system, we show that this approach indeed reveals significant new topological information. Based on traceroute measurements from hundreds of thousands of edge systems, we are able to discover tens of thousands of links invisible to public views. We validate our heuristics using data from a tier-1 ISP and show that they correctly filter out all false links introduced by public IP-to-AS mapping. We have made our dataset of missing links publicly available below.

People

Faculty

Grad Students

Collaborators

  • Dan Pei (AT&T)
  • Yao Zhao

Publications

Resources

  • Missing AS links dataset:

    We ask that you create an account on our website to access the data. Once you have created an account and logged in, a download link will appear at the bottom of this page. Any paper that uses this dataset must refer to the publication above and you must send us a copy of the paper upon publication.

    This data is part of the EdgeScope project, which provides researchers with access to network measurements collected from hundreds of thousands of end users.

  • Traceroute data

    This data is made available as part of the EdgeScope project.

  • Public view data