An analysis of internet topology via traceroute sampling

Internet topology analyses have been well investigated for years; however, previous research was always based on large-scale censuses of all the Internet routers around the world. To reduce census efforts but still to figure out the Internet topology, we propose a traceroute sampling process to quickly observe Internet topology in this paper. In the process, we first chose four sets of IP addresses: 191 web sites of Network Information Centers (NICs), 227 government portal sites, 2004 Fortune Global 500 corporations’ web sites, and a set of 10,000 randomly chosen IP addresses as samples, respectively. Then, we used a traceroute-based utility to probe and collect all the routing information about the IP addresses and their associated links, from our laboratory to all the chosen IP addresses, into our Internet topology database. Through topological analysis of the database, we confirmed that the topological metrics of our probed Internet are similar to the analytical results found by previous Internet router censuses. Besides, the small-world and scale-free properties still exhibit in our probed Internet topology, and the results confirm the validity of our traceroute sampling on the Internet topology observation.