Network layer internet topology mapping, modeling, and sampling
Kamil Saraç, Mehmet Engin Tozal · 2012
Network administrators heavily depend on tools such as ping, traceroute, and mrinfo for analyzing and debugging their networks. These tools and their variants are also used by researchers to build network topology maps to understand the structural and operational characteristics of the Internet. Internet topology at the network layer consists of routers and subnetworks (subnets), i.e., point-to-point or multi-access connections. This study presents (1) an IP alias resolution (task of mapping IP addresses to their corresponding routers) approach with linear probing complexity for building router level network topology maps, (2) a methodology to infer subnets, (3) a complementary representation of network topologies called subnet level topology maps, and (4) a statistical framework for estimating subnet characteristics without building the entire topology maps.