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In search of the elusive ground truth: the internet's as-level connectivity structure

Published: 02 June 2008 Publication History

Abstract

Despite significant efforts to obtain an accurate picture of the Internet's actual connectivity structure at the level of individual autonomous systems (ASes), much has remained unknown in terms of the quality of the inferred AS maps that have been widely used by the research community. In this paper we assess the quality of the inferred Internet maps through case studies of a set of ASes. These case studies allow us to establish the ground truth of AS-level Internet connectivity between the set of ASes and their directly connected neighbors. They also enable a direct comparison between the ground truth and inferred topology maps and yield new insights into questions such as which parts of the actual topology are adequately captured by the inferred maps, and which parts are missing and why. This information is critical in assessing for what kinds of real-world networking problems the use of currently inferred AS maps or proposed AS topology models are, or are not, appropriate. More importantly, our newly gained insights also point to new directions towards building realistic and economically viable Internet topology maps.

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  1. In search of the elusive ground truth: the internet's as-level connectivity structure

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    SIGMETRICS '08: Proceedings of the 2008 ACM SIGMETRICS international conference on Measurement and modeling of computer systems
    June 2008
    486 pages
    ISBN:9781605580050
    DOI:10.1145/1375457
    • cover image ACM SIGMETRICS Performance Evaluation Review
      ACM SIGMETRICS Performance Evaluation Review  Volume 36, Issue 1
      SIGMETRICS '08
      June 2008
      469 pages
      ISSN:0163-5999
      DOI:10.1145/1384529
      Issue’s Table of Contents
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    Published: 02 June 2008

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    Author Tags

    1. BGP
    2. inter-domain routing
    3. internet topology

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