article

Lord of the links: a framework for discovering missing links in the internet topology

Authors:

Georgos Siganos,

Michalis Faloutsos,

Srikanth KrishnamurthyAuthors Info & Claims

IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking (TON), Volume 17, Issue 2

Pages 391 - 404

https://doi.org/10.1109/TNET.2008.926512

Published: 01 April 2009 Publication History

Abstract

The topology of the Internet at the Autonomous System (AS) level is not yet fully discovered despite significant research activity. The community still does not know how many links are missing, where these links are and finally, whether the missing links will change our conceptual model of the Internet topology. An accurate and complete model of the topology would be important for protocol design, performance evaluation and analyses. The goal of our work is to develop methodologies and tools to identify and validate such missing links between ASes. In this work, we develop several methods and identify a significant number of missing links, particularly of the peer-to-peer type. Interestingly, most of the missing AS links that we find exist as peer-to-peer links at the Internet Exchange Points (IXPs). First, in more detail, we provide a large-scale comprehensive synthesis of the available sources of information. We cross-validate and compare BGP routing tables, Internet Routing Registries, and traceroute data, while we extract significant new information from the less-studied Internet Exchange Points (IXPs). We identify 40% more edges and approximately 300% more peer-to-peer edges compared to commonly used data sets. All of these edges have been verified by either BGP tables or traceroute. Second, we identify properties of the new edges and quantify their effects on important topological properties. Given the new peer-to-peer edges, we find that for some ASes more than 50% of their paths stop going through their ISPs assuming policy-aware routing. A surprising observation is that the degree of an AS may be a poor indicator of which ASes it will peer with.

References

[1]

S. Floyd and V. Paxson, "Difficulties in simulating the Internet," IEEE/ACM Trans. Networking, vol. 9, no. 4, pp. 392-403, Aug. 2001.

Digital Library

[2]

H. Chang, R. Govindan, S. Jamin, S. Shenker, and W. Willinger, "Towards capturing representative AS-level Internet topologies," Computer Networks, vol. 44, no. 6, pp. 737-755, 2004.

Digital Library

[3]

B. Zhang, R. A. Liu, D. Massey, and L. Zhang, "Collecting the Internet as-level topology," ACM SIGCOMM Comput. Commun. Rev. (CCR), vol. 35, no. 1, pp. 53-61, Jan. 2005.

Digital Library

[4]

Y. Shavitt and E. Shir, "DIMES: let the Internet measure itself," ACM SIGCOMM Comput. Commun. Rev. (CCR), vol. 35, no. 5, pp. 71-74, Oct. 2005.

Digital Library

[5]

X. Dimitropoulos, D. Krioukov, and G. Riley, "Revisiting Internet AS-level topology discovery," in Proc. Passive and Active Measurement (PAM) Workshop, Boston, MA, 2005.

Digital Library

[6]

P. Mahadevan, D. Krioukov, M. Fomenkov, B. Huffaker, X. Dimitropoulos, K. claffy, and A. Vahdat, "The Internet AS-level topology: Three data sources and one definitive metric," ACM SIGCOMM Comput. Commun. Rev. (CCR), vol. 36, no. 1, pp. 17-26, Jan. 2006.

Digital Library

[7]

H. Chang, S. Jamin, and W. Willinger, "To peer or not to peer: Modeling the evolution of the Internet's AS-level topology," in Proc. IEEE INFOCOM, 2006, 12 pp.

[8]

L. Colitti, G. DiBattista, M. Patrignani, M. Pizzonia, and M. Rimondini, "Investigating prefix propagation through active BGP probing," Microprocessors Microsyst., vol. 31, no. 7, pp. 460-474, 2007.

Digital Library

[9]

R. Cohen and D. Raz, "The Internet dark matter--on the missing links in the AS connectivity map," in Proc. IEEE INFOCOM, 2006, 12 pp.

[10]

Internet Routing Registry. {Online}. Available: http://www.irr.net

[11]

K. Xu, Z. Duan, Z. Zhang, and J. Chandrashekar, "On properties of Internet exchange points and their impact on AS tolology and relationship," in Networking, 2004, pp. 284-295.

[12]

G. Siganos and M. Faloutsos, "Analyzing BGP policies: Methodology and tool," in Proc. IEEE INFOCOM, 2004, vol. 3, pp. 1640-1651.

[13]

Y. He, G. Siganos, M. Faloutsos, and S. Krishnamurthy, "A systematic framework for unearthing the missing links: Measurements and impact," in USENIX NSDI, Cambridge, MA, Apr. 2007.

Digital Library

[14]

Oregon Routeview Project. {Online}. Available: http://www.route-views.org

[15]

Ripe Route Information Service. {Online}. Available: http://www.ripe. net/ris

[16]

A. Lakhina, J. W. Byers, M. Crovella, and P. Xie, "Sampling biases in IP topology measurements," in Proc. IEEE INFOCOM, 2003, vol. 1, pp. 332-341.

[17]

D. Achlioptas, A. Clauset, D. Kempe, and C. Moore, "On the bias of traceroute sampling, or power-law degree distributions in regular graphs," in Proc. STOC'05, Baltimore, MD, May 2005, pp. 694-703.

Digital Library

[18]

R. V. Oliveira, B. Zhang, and L. Zhang, "Observing the evolution of Internet AS topology," in Proc. ACM SIGCOMM, 2007, pp. 313-324.

Digital Library

[19]

Z. Mao, J. Rexford, J. Wang, and R. Katz, "Towards an accurate AS-level traceroute tool," in Proc. ACM SIGCOMM, 2003, pp. 365-378.

Digital Library

[20]

Z. M. Mao, D. Johnson, J. Rexford, J. Wang, and R. Katz, "Scalable and accurate identification of AS-level forwarding paths," in Proc. IEEE INFOCOM, 2004, vol. 3, pp. 1605-1615.

[21]

B. Augustin, X. Cuvellier, B. Orgogozo, F. Viger, T. Friedman, M. Latapy, C. Magnien, and R. Teixeira, "Avoiding traceroute anomalies with Paris traceroute," in Proc. ACM IMC'06, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Oct. 2006, pp. 153-158.

Digital Library

[22]

E. Shir, Dec. 2005, Personal communication via e-mail.

[23]

B. Donnet, P. Raoult, T. Friedman, and M. Crovella, "Efficient algorithms for large-scale topology discovery," in Proc. ACM SIGMETRICS , Jun. 2005, pp. 327-338.

Digital Library

[24]

N. Spring, R. Mahajan, D. Wetherall, and T. Anderson, "Measuring ISP topologies with Rocketfuel," IEEE/ACM Trans. Netw., vol. 12, no. 1, pp. 2-16, Feb. 2004.

Digital Library

[25]

S. Jaiswal, A. Rosenberg, and D. Towsley, "Comparing the structure of power law graphs and the Internet AS graph," in Proc. 12th IEEE Int. Conf. Network Protocols (ICNP'04), 2004, pp. 294-303.

Digital Library

[26]

S. Jin and A. Bestavros, "An empirical study of inherent routing bias in variable-degree networks," Boston Univ., Boston, MA, Tech. Rep., 2003.

[27]

J. Xia and L. Gao, "On the evaluation of AS relationship inferences," in Proc. IEEE Globecom, 2004, vol. 3, pp. 1373-1377.

[28]

Traceroute. {Online}. Available: http://www.traceroute.org

[29]

M. Faloutsos, P. Faloutsos, and C. Faloutsos, "On power-law relationships of the Internet topology," in Proc. ACM SIGCOMM, 1999, pp. 251-262.

Digital Library

[30]

A. Medina, I. Matta, and J. Byers, "On the origin of powerlaws in Internet topologies," ACM SIGCOMM Comput. Commun. Rev. (CCR), vol. 30, no. 2, pp. 18-34, Apr. 2000.

Digital Library

[31]

Q. Chen, H. Chang, R. Govindan, S. Jamin, S. J. Shenker, and W. Willinger, "The origin of power laws in Internet topologies revisited," in Proc. IEEE INFOCOM, 2002, pp. 608-617.

[32]

L. Gao and F. Wang, "The extent of AS path inflation by routing policies," in Proc. IEEE Globecom, 2002, vol. 3, pp. 2180-2184.

[33]

N. T. Spring, R. Mahajan, and T. E. Anderson, "The causes of path inflation," in Proc. ACM SIGCOMM, 2003, p. 113-124.

Digital Library

[34]

M. Caesar and J. Rexford, "BGP routing policies in ISP networks," IEEE Network, vol. 19, no. 6, pp. 5-11, Nov./Dec. 2005.

Digital Library

[35]

Packete Cleaning House. {Online}. Available: http://www.pch.net

[36]

L. Amimi, A. Shaikh, and H. Schulzrinne, "Issues with inferring Internet topological attributes," in Proc. SPIE ITCom, 2002, vol. 4685, pp. 80-90.

[37]

Y. Hyun, A. Broido, and K. Claffy, Traceroute and BGP AS path incongruities. {Online}. Available: www.caida.org/outreach/papers/ 2003/ASP/

[38]

European Internet Exchange Assoc. {Online}. Available: http://www. euro-ix.net

Cited By

Salamatian LVermeulen KCunha IGiotsas VKatz-Bassett EVallina-Rodríguez NSuarez-Tángil GLevin DPelsser C(2024)metAScritic: Reframing AS-Level Topology Discovery as a Recommendation SystemProceedings of the 2024 ACM on Internet Measurement Conference10.1145/3646547.3688429(337-364)Online publication date: 4-Nov-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3646547.3688429
Prehn LLichtblau FDietzel CFeldmann A(2022)Peering Only? Analyzing the Reachability Benefits of Joining Large IXPs TodayPassive and Active Measurement10.1007/978-3-030-98785-5_15(338-366)Online publication date: 28-Mar-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/978-3-030-98785-5_15
Jin ZShi XYang YYin XWang ZWu J(2020)TopoScopeProceedings of the ACM Internet Measurement Conference10.1145/3419394.3423627(266-280)Online publication date: 27-Oct-2020
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3419394.3423627
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

Lord of the links: a framework for discovering missing links in the internet topology
1. General and reference
  1. Cross-computing tools and techniques
    1. Performance
2. Networks
  1. Network properties
    1. Network structure
  2. Network protocols
    1. Network layer protocols
      1. Routing protocols

Recommendations

A survey on the recent efforts of the Internet Standardization Body for securing inter-domain routing

The Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) is the de facto inter-domain routing protocol in the Internet, thus it plays a crucial role in current communications. Unfortunately, it was conceived without any internal security mechanism, and hence is prone to a ...
On the incompleteness of the AS-level graph: a novel methodology for BGP route collector placement
IMC '12: Proceedings of the 2012 Internet Measurement Conference

In the last decade many studies have used the Internet AS-level topology to perform several analyses, from discovering its graph properties to assessing its impact on the effectiveness of worm-containment strategies. Yet, the BGP data typically used to ...
Implications of autonomy for the expressiveness of policy routing
Proceedings of the 2005 conference on Applications, technologies, architectures, and protocols for computer communications

Thousands of competing autonomous systems must cooperate with each other to provide global Internet connectivity. Each autonomous system (AS) encodes various economic, business, and performance decisions in its routing policy. The current interdomain ...

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking

IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking Volume 17, Issue 2

April 2009

319 pages

ISSN:1063-6692

Issue’s Table of Contents

Publisher

IEEE Press

Publication History

Published: 01 April 2009

Revised: 13 January 2008

Received: 22 June 2007

Published in TON Volume 17, Issue 2

Author Tags

Qualifiers

Article

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

31
Total Citations
View Citations
477
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)0
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)0

Reflects downloads up to 17 Feb 2025

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

Salamatian LVermeulen KCunha IGiotsas VKatz-Bassett EVallina-Rodríguez NSuarez-Tángil GLevin DPelsser C(2024)metAScritic: Reframing AS-Level Topology Discovery as a Recommendation SystemProceedings of the 2024 ACM on Internet Measurement Conference10.1145/3646547.3688429(337-364)Online publication date: 4-Nov-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3646547.3688429
Prehn LLichtblau FDietzel CFeldmann A(2022)Peering Only? Analyzing the Reachability Benefits of Joining Large IXPs TodayPassive and Active Measurement10.1007/978-3-030-98785-5_15(338-366)Online publication date: 28-Mar-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/978-3-030-98785-5_15
Jin ZShi XYang YYin XWang ZWu J(2020)TopoScopeProceedings of the ACM Internet Measurement Conference10.1145/3419394.3423627(266-280)Online publication date: 27-Oct-2020
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3419394.3423627
Jin YScott CDhamdhere AGiotsas VKrishnamurthy AShenker SLorch JYu M(2019)Stable and practical AS relationship inference with problinkProceedings of the 16th USENIX Conference on Networked Systems Design and Implementation10.5555/3323234.3323282(581-597)Online publication date: 26-Feb-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/3323234.3323282
Gregori ELenzini LLuconi V(2017)AS-Level Topology DiscoveryComputer Communications10.1016/j.comcom.2017.08.015112:C(47-57)Online publication date: 1-Nov-2017
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1016/j.comcom.2017.08.015
Masoud MJaradat YJannoud IHuang H(2017)The Impact of 16-bit and 32-bit ASNs Coexistence on the Accuracy of Internet AS GraphJournal of Network and Systems Management10.1007/s10922-016-9389-525:2(253-268)Online publication date: 1-Apr-2017
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/s10922-016-9389-5
Comarela GTerzi ECrovella MGill PHeidemann JByers JGovindan R(2016)Detecting Unusually-Routed ASesProceedings of the 2016 Internet Measurement Conference10.1145/2987443.2987478(445-459)Online publication date: 14-Nov-2016
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2987443.2987478
Berenguer SCarisimo EAlvarez-Hamelin JPintor FCasas PLeão RPaganini FAlvarez-Hamelin JBustos-Jiménez J(2016)Hidden Internet topologies infoProceedings of the 2016 workshop on Fostering Latin-American Research in Data Communication Networks10.1145/2940116.2940118(4-6)Online publication date: 22-Aug-2016
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2940116.2940118
Faggiani AGregori ELenzini LLuconi VBustamante FKrishnamurthy BWillinger W(2015)Measuring the Internet Topology with SmartphonesProceedings of the 2015 ACM SIGCOMM Workshop on Crowdsourcing and Crowdsharing of Big (Internet) Data10.1145/2787394.2787398(45-50)Online publication date: 17-Aug-2015
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2787394.2787398
Gregori EImprota ALenzini LRossi LSani L(2015)A novel methodology to address the internet AS-level data incompletenessIEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking10.1109/TNET.2014.232312823:4(1314-1327)Online publication date: 1-Aug-2015
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/TNET.2014.2323128
Show More Cited By

View Options

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Full Access

Get this Article

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

eReader

View online with eReader.

Figures

Tables

Media

View Issue’s Table of Contents