1 research outputs found
The Internet AS-Level Topology: Three Data Sources and One Definitive Metric
We calculate an extensive set of characteristics for Internet AS topologies
extracted from the three data sources most frequently used by the research
community: traceroutes, BGP, and WHOIS. We discover that traceroute and BGP
topologies are similar to one another but differ substantially from the WHOIS
topology. Among the widely considered metrics, we find that the joint degree
distribution appears to fundamentally characterize Internet AS topologies as
well as narrowly define values for other important metrics. We discuss the
interplay between the specifics of the three data collection mechanisms and the
resulting topology views. In particular, we show how the data collection
peculiarities explain differences in the resulting joint degree distributions
of the respective topologies. Finally, we release to the community the input
topology datasets, along with the scripts and output of our calculations. This
supplement should enable researchers to validate their models against real data
and to make more informed selection of topology data sources for their specific
needs.Comment: This paper is a revised journal version of cs.NI/050803