On the performance and improvement of alias resolution methods for Internet core networks

Abstract

The Internet is a huge interconnection of thousands of networks with different technologies, equipment, configurations, and administrative owners. This, added to the lack of public information about those individual infrastructures, makes it a difficult task to provide a so-called Internet map: a topological map with information of routers, interconnections between routers, and IP addressing configuration. Traditional topology discovery methods based on traceroutes only provide IP addresses in the path between end-nodes. Some of those IP addresses can belong to the same router, and this identification is made by alias resolution methods. Therefore, alias resolution allows to provide router-level map of the Internet with important applications in network simulation, protocol design, network management, network security, network service design, and geolocation. resolution methods are analyzed in Internet core networks (GlobalNOC, Canet4, and Geant). This allows to identify peculiar behaviors in these core networks, improving alias resolution methods. Simultaneously, reduction methods are used to decrease the number of probing packets in alias resolution methods.

Validity of Router Responses for IP Aliases Resolution

“…In table 4, percentages of occurrences for each SourceIP-based behavior are presented. As stated in [14], very low values of responsiveness are present in this method with direct UDP probing. Besides, valid responsiveness has also very low values: 7.26% of routers answer with Different-interface behavior usable to apply this technique for IP aliases resolution.…”

“…In [14], Ally-based techniques are proposed extending the types of probe packets (ICMP, TCP) and the number of probe packets compared with the standard Ally. The rate at which probe packets are generated is also controlled with 0.3 secs inter-packet delay.…”

“…"Unknown" are those pairs of IP addresses that have not provided enough information to identify the aliasing (they provided some but not enough information). Take note that the percentage of false positives and false negatives can not be provided because the real network topology is unknown (those ratios can be found in studies like [14]).…”

Alias resolution techniques

“…The first one can be performed using traceroute like measurements [11]. The traceroute provides IP addresses and links in the path between one vantage point and one destination.…”