Estimating Hop Distance Between Arbitrary Host Pairs

—Establishing a clear and timely picture of Internet topology is complicated by many factors including the vast size and dynamic nature of the infrastructure. In this paper, we describe a methodology for estimating an important characteristic of Internet topology - the hop distance between arbitrary pairs of end hosts. Our goal is to develop an approach to pairwise hop distance estimation that is accurate, scalable, timely and does not require a significant measurement infrastructure. Our methodology is based on deploying a small set of landmark nodes that use traceroute-like probes between each other to establish a set of accurate pairwise hop distances. The landmark nodes are also configured to collect source IP addresses and TTL values from passively monitored network packet traffic. We develop a novel multidimensional scaling algorithm that can be applied to both the passive and active measurements to generate pairwise hop distance estimates for all of the observed source host...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: INFOCOM
• Authors: Brian Eriksson, Paul Barford, Robert D. Nowak
• Keywords: Accurate Pairwise Hop, Communications, Hop Distance Estimates, INFOCOM 2009, Pairwise Hop Distance