Selecting representative IP addresses for internet topology studies

An Internet hitlist is a set of addresses that cover and can represent the the Internet as a whole. Hitlists have long been used in studies of Internet topology, reachability, and performance, serving as the destinations of traceroute or performance probes. Most early topology studies used manually generated lists of prominent addresses, but evolution and growth of the Internet make human maintenance untenable. Random selection scales to today's address space, but most random addresses fail to respond. In this paper we present what we believe is the first automatic generation of hitlists informed censuses of Internet addresses. We formalize the desirable characteristics of a hitlist: responsiveness, each representative responds to pings; completeness, they cover all the allocated IPv4 address space; and stability, list evolution is minimized when possible. We quantify the accuracy of our automatic hitlists, showing that only one-third of the Internet allows informed selection of ...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: IMC
• Authors: Xun Fan, John Heidemann
• Keywords: Address Space, IMC 2010, Internet, Internet Technology, Most Early Topology