Extracting Intra-domain Topology from mrinfo Probing

Abstract

Active and passive measurements for topology discovery have known an impressive growth during the last decade. If a lot of work has been done regarding inter-domain topology discovery and modeling, only a few papers raise the question of how to extract intra-domain topologies from measurements results.

In this paper, based on a large dataset collected with mrinfo, a multicast tool that silently discovers all interfaces of a router, we provide a mechanism for retrieving intra-domain topologies. The main challenge is to assign an AS number to a border router whose IP addresses are not mapped to the same AS. Our algorithm is based on probabilistic and empirical IP allocation rules. The goal of our pool of rules is to converge to a consistent router to AS mapping. We show that our router-to-AS algorithm results in a mapping in more than 99% of the cases. Furthermore, with mrinfo, point-to-point links between routers can be distinguished from multiple links attached to a switch, providing an accurate view of the collected topologies. Finally, we provide a set of large intra-domain topologies in various formats.