Mapping and visualizing the internet
ATEC '00 Proceedings of the annual conference on USENIX Annual Technical Conference
Inferring subnets in router-level topology collection studies
Proceedings of the 7th ACM SIGCOMM conference on Internet measurement
Detection, understanding, and prevention of traceroute measurement artifacts
Computer Networks: The International Journal of Computer and Telecommunications Networking
P4p: provider portal for applications
Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM 2008 conference on Data communication
SSS '09 Proceedings of the 11th International Symposium on Stabilization, Safety, and Security of Distributed Systems
The weak network tracing problem
ICDCN'10 Proceedings of the 11th international conference on Distributed computing and networking
Network Topology Inference Based on End-to-End Measurements
IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications
Brief announcement: a conjecture on traceability, and a new class of traceable networks
SSS'11 Proceedings of the 13th international conference on Stabilization, safety, and security of distributed systems
Misleading stars: what cannot be measured in the Internet?
DISC'11 Proceedings of the 25th international conference on Distributed computing
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Many systems require information about the topology of networks on the Internet, for purposes like management, efficiency, testing of new protocols and so on. However, ISPs usually do not share the actual topology maps with outsiders; thus, in order to obtain the topology of a network on the Internet, a system must reconstruct it from publicly observable data. The standard method employs traceroute to obtain paths between nodes; next, a topology is generated such that the observed paths occur in the graph. However, traceroute has the problem that some routers refuse to reveal their addresses, and appear as anonymous nodes in traces. Previous research on the problem of topology inference with anonymous nodes has demonstrated that it is at best NP-complete. In this paper, we improve upon this result. In our previous research, we showed that in the special case where nodes may be anonymous in some traces but not in all traces (so all node identifiers are known), there exist trace sets that are generable from multiple topologies. This paper extends our theory of network tracing to the general case (with strictly anonymous nodes), and shows that the problem of computing the network that generated a trace set, given the trace set, has no general solution. The weak version of the problem, which allows an algorithm to output a "small" set of networks- any one of which is the correct one- is also not solvable. Any algorithm guaranteed to output the correct topology outputs at least an exponential number of networks. Our results are surprisingly robust: they hold even when the network is known to have exactly two anonymous nodes, and every node as well as every edge in the network is guaranteed to occur in some trace. On the basis of this result, we suggest that exact reconstruction of network topology requires more powerful tools than traceroute.