Measuring ISP topologies with Rocketfuel

Ratul Mahajan
University of Washington
CSE

To date, realistic ISP topologies have not been accessible
to the research community, leaving work that depends on
topology on an uncertain footing. In this talk, we present
new Internet mapping techniques that have enabled us to
directly measure router-level ISP topologies. Our
techniques reduce the number of required traces compared to
a brute-force, all-to-all approach by three orders of
magnitude without a significant loss in accuracy. They
include the use of BGP routing tables to direct a focused
search, better alias resolution, and the use of DNS to
divide each map into POPs and backbone. We collected ISP maps
from ten diverse ISPs using our techniques, and find that our
maps are substantially more complete than those of earlier
Internet mapping efforts. As part of this work, we will
release our maps to the research community.


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