Network Topology Discovery: a Problem of Incomplete Data Improvement

The logical and physical topology description of an enterprise computer network is required for many network management tasks. However, the automatized building of such description is complicated due to the connectivity data incompleteness. This leads to the necessity of solving the problem of incomplete data improvement. In this paper we used previous works on the network modeling and commonly used reachability set abstraction to solve the denoted problem. The contribution of this paper is a criterion for determining when the connectivity data is sufficient for building topology descriptions and the algorithm for incomplete data improvement based on the criteria. The algorithm implementation test and evaluations provided in the paper show its correctness, applicability for using in the real enterprise networks and its greater effectiveness comparing to the other existing methods

An algorithm for building an enterprise network topology using widespread data sources

A lot of network management tasks depend on the description of the network topology. However, the lack of standard methods of the network elements detection, coupled with the incompleteness and heterogeneity of the available topology data, complicate the network topology discovery process. In these conditions, formal models and methods of topology discovery are required. Contribution of the paper is an algorithm for automated enterprise network topology discovery based on a previously developed graph model and criteria for building graph elements. The proposed algorithm is capable of dealing with incomplete heterogeneous data about network topology as well as with the presence in the network of uncooperative devices. The paper also evaluates the algorithm and provides the testing results

A graph model of the topology of physical, link and network layers of an enterprise network

Many network management tasks require a network topology graph as its input. However, the lack of standard methods of network elements detection, coupled with the incompleteness and heterogeneity of the available topology data, complicate the network topology discovery process. In these conditions it is rational to separate the task of collecting data about the current topology of the network from the tasks of analyzing the collected data and building a topology graph. This approach requires a definition of the modern enterprise networks topology graphs family. Contribution of the paper is the graph model of the topology of physical, link and network layers of a modern enterprise Ethernet and IP based network. A set of theorems proved in the paper allows to infer parts of the topology graph, which are not described by data available on the network devices. Three-step process of building a topology graph using the network data and inference procedures is also proposed in the paper