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A novel methodology to address the internet AS-level data incompleteness

Published: 01 August 2015 Publication History

Abstract

In the last decade, many studies have used the Internet autonomous system (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 Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) data used to reveal the topologies are far from complete. Our contribution is threefold. First, we analyze BGP data currently gathered by the most famous route collector projects, highlighting and explaining the causes of their incompleteness. We found that large areas of the Internet are not properly captured due to the geographical location of route collector feeders and due to BGP filters, such as export policies and decision processes. Second, we propose a methodology based on a new metric, named p2c-distance, which is able to: 1) identify the minimum number of ASs required to obtain an Internet AS-level topology that is closer to reality; and 2) identify a ranking list of these ASs to show that it is possible to obtain nonnegligible coverage improvements with a limited number of appropriately chosen feeding ASs. Third, we characterize the ASs that were found to be part of the solution of the above covering problems. We found that the route collectors are rarely connected to these ASs, thus highlighting that much effort is needed to devise a route collector infrastructure that ideally would be able to capture a complete view of the Internet.

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Published In

cover image IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking
IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking  Volume 23, Issue 4
August 2015
341 pages
ISSN:1063-6692
  • Editor:
  • R. Srikant
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IEEE Press

Publication History

Published: 01 August 2015
Published in TON Volume 23, Issue 4

Author Tags

  1. AS-level topology
  2. autonomous systems
  3. border gateway protocol (BGP)
  4. data incompleteness
  5. internet

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  • (2021)How biased is our validation (data) for AS relationships?Proceedings of the 21st ACM Internet Measurement Conference10.1145/3487552.3487825(612-620)Online publication date: 2-Nov-2021
  • (2021)Discovering obscure looking glass sites on the web to facilitate internet measurement researchProceedings of the 17th International Conference on emerging Networking EXperiments and Technologies10.1145/3485983.3494857(426-439)Online publication date: 2-Dec-2021
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