Traceroute-Based Topology Inference without Network Coordinate Estimation

Abstract— Underlay topology information is important to construct efficient overlay networks. To achieve end-to-end network topology inference among a group of hosts, traceroute-like tools are often used. Previously, Max-Delta has been proposed to infer a highly accurate topology with a low number of traceroutes. However, Max-Delta relies on external tools to estimate host coordinates, which incur considerable deployment overhead. In this paper, we consider novel inference schemes with no coordinate estimation. One choice is to select long paths to traceroute. That is, based on existing traceroute results, each host can estimate the distance between another host and itself. It can then select the host with the largest distance between them as the traceroute target. We call this scheme Longest-Path-First (LPF). Similarly, we can define Shortest-Path-First (SPF) inference. The intuition may indicate that LPF performs better than SPF, as longer paths often contain more underlay links ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: ICC
• Authors: Xing Jin, Wanqing Tu, S.-H. Gary Chan
• Keywords: Communications, ICC 2008, Inference Scheme, Long Paths, Short Paths