Network Topology Inference Based on End-to-End Measurements
IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications
Improving content delivery using provider-aided distance information
IMC '10 Proceedings of the 10th ACM SIGCOMM conference on Internet measurement
The weak network tracing problem
ICDCN'10 Proceedings of the 11th international conference on Distributed computing and networking
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A widely used mechanism for computing the topology of any network in the Internet is Traceroute. Using Traceroute, one simply needs to choose any two nodes in a network and then obtain the sequence of nodes that occur between these two nodes, as specified by the routing tables in these nodes. Thus, each use of Traceroute in a network produces a trace of nodes that constitute a simple path in this network. In every trace that is produced by Traceroute, each node occurs either by its unique identifier or by the anonymous identifier "*". In this paper, we introduce the first theory aimed at answering the following important question. Is there an algorithm to compute the topology of a network N from a trace set T that is produced by using Traceroute in N, assuming that each edge in N occurs in at least one trace in T, and that each node in N occurs by its unique identifier in at least one trace in T? Our theory shows that the answer to this question is "No" in general. But if N is a tree, or is an odd ring, then the answer is "Yes". On the other hand, if N is an even ring, the answer is "No", but if N is a "mostly regular" even ring, then the answer is "Yes".