The Internet Dark Matter - on the Missing Links in the AS Connectivity Map

Abstract— The topological structure of the Internet infrastructure is an important and interesting subject that attracted significant research attention in the last few years. Apart from the pure intellectual challenge of understanding a very big, complex, and ever evolving system, knowing the structure of the Internet topology is very important for developing and studying new protocols and algorithms. Starting with the fundamental work of Falostous et. al, a considerable amount of work was done recently in this field, improving our knowledge and understanding of the Internet structure. However, one basic problem is still unanswered: how big is the Internet. In the AS level this means: how many peering relations exist between ASs. Finding this number is hard since there is no direct way to retrieve information from all nodes regarding their direct neighbors, and all our knowledge is based on sampling processes. Thus, it is very difficult to characterize the Internet since it may w...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2006
• Where: INFOCOM
• Authors: Rami Cohen, Danny Raz
• Keywords: Communications, INFOCOM 2006, Internet, Pure Intellectual Challenge, Significant Research Attention