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USENIX, The Advanced Computing Systems Association

4th USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design & Implementation

Pp. 187–200 of the Proceedings

A Systematic Framework for Unearthing the Missing Links: Measurements and Impact

Yihua He, Georgos Siganos, Michalis Faloutsos, and Srikanth Krishnamurthy, University of California, Riverside

Abstract

The lack of an accurate representation of the Internet topology at the Autonomous System (AS) level is a limiting factor in the design, simulation, and modeling efforts in inter-domain routing protocols. In this paper, we design and implement a framework for identifying AS links that are missing from the commonly-used Internet topology snapshots. We apply our framework and show that the new links that we find change the current Internet topology model in a non-trivial way. First, in more detail, our framework provides 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 newinformation 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. 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 ISP providers assuming policy-aware routing. A surprising observation is that the degree of a node may be a poor indicator of which ASes it will peer with: the two degrees differ by a factor of four or more in 50% of the peer-to-peer links. Finally, we attempt to estimate the number of edges we may still be missing.

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