Rigorous measurement of IP-level neighborhood of Internet core routers

Christophe Crespelle, Matthieu Latapy, Elie Rotenberg

Proceedings of the third International Workshop on Network Science for Communication Networks (NetSciCom 2010), In conjunction with IEEE Infocom 2010.

Many contributions use the degree distribution of IP-level internet topology. However, current knowledge of this property relies on biased and erroneous measurements, and so it is subject to much debate. We introduce here a new approach, dedicated to the core of the internet, which avoids the issues raised by classical measurements. It is based on the measurement of IP-level neighborhood of internet core routers, for which we design and implement a rigorous method. It consists in sending traceroute probes from many monitors distributed in the internet towards a given target router and carefully selecting the relevant information in collected data. Using simulations, we provide strong evidence of the accuracy of our approach. We then conduct real-world measurements illustrating the practical effectiveness of our method. This constitutes a significant step towards reliable knowledge of the IP-level degree distribution of the core of the internet.

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