On the impact of layer-2 on node degree distribution

  • Authors:
  • Pascal Mérindol;Benoit Donnet;Olivier Bonaventure;Jean-Jacques Pansiot

  • Affiliations:
  • Universté catholique de Louvain, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium;Université catholique de Louvain, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium;Université catholique de Louvain, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium;Université de Strasbourg, Strasbourg, France

  • Venue:
  • IMC '10 Proceedings of the 10th ACM SIGCOMM conference on Internet measurement
  • Year:
  • 2010

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Abstract

The Internet topology data collected through traceroute exploration has been extensively studied in the past. In particular, a remarkable property of the Internet, the power-law shape of node degree distribution, drew the attention of the research community. Several studies have since questioned this property. In this paper, based on a large dataset collected using mrinfo, we show that the node degree distribution is strongly impacted by the presence of layer-2 (L2) networks, such as switches. L2 devices interconnect a large number of routers, themselves being also involved in multiple L2 interconnections. Such a situation induces nodes with very high degree when analyzing the layer-3 (L3) graph with traceroute probing. Considering the physical design of a network, our analysis provides a lower bound on the bias generated by using only an L3 view. We also provide a model that can be a first step towards L2 aware topology generation.