AS Relationships: Inference and Validation

Abstract

Research on performance, robustness, and evolution of the global Internet is fundamentally handicapped without accurate and thorough knowledge of the nature and structure of the contractual relationships between Autonomous Systems (ASs). In this work we introduce novel heuristics for inferring AS relationships. Our heuristics improve upon previous works in several technical aspects, which we outline in detail and demonstrate with several examples. Seeking to increase the value and reliability of our inference results, we then focus on validation of inferred AS relationships. We perform a survey with ASs' network administrators to collect information on the actual connectivity and policies of the surveyed ASs. Based on the survey results, we find that our new AS relationship inference techniques achieve high levels of accuracy: we correctly infer 96.5% customer to provider (c2p), 82.8% peer to peer (p2p), and 90.3% sibling to sibling (s2s) relationships. We then cross-compare the reported AS connectivity with the AS connectivity data contained in BGP tables. We find that BGP tables miss up to 86.2% of the true adjacencies of the surveyed ASs. The majority of the missing links are of the p2p type, which highlights the limitations of present measuring techniques to capture links of this type. Finally, to make our results easily accessible and practically useful for the community, we open an AS relationship repository where we archive, on a weekly basis, and make publicly available the complete Internet AS-level topology annotated with AS relationship information for every pair of AS neighbors.

Final journal version

References in corpus (3)

• The Internet AS-Level Topology: Three Data Sources and One Definitive Metric
• Exploring networks with traceroute-like probes: theory and simulations
• Inferring AS Relationships: Dead End or Lively Beginning?

Cited by in corpus (13)

• Power-law distributions in empirical data
• Hyperbolic Geometry of Complex Networks
• Network Mapping by Replaying Hyperbolic Growth
• Network Geometry Inference using Common Neighbors
• Graph Annotations in Modeling Complex Network Topologies
• Evolution of the Internet k-dense structure
• Optimal map of the modular structure of complex networks
• Don't Forget to Lock the Front Door! Inferring the Deployment of Source Address Validation of Inbound Traffic
• The Closed Resolver Project: Measuring the Deployment of Source Address Validation of Inbound Traffic
• Evolution of the Internet AS-Level Ecosystem
• Structural efficiency of percolation landscapes in flow networks
• Cutting Through the Noise to Infer Autonomous System Topology
• On Cycles in AS Relationships