Title
Network Topology Inference with Partial Information
Abstract
Full knowledge of the routing topology of the Internet is useful for a multitude of network management tasks. However, the full topology is often not known and is instead estimated using topology inference algorithms. Many of these algorithms use Traceroute to probe paths and then use the collected information to infer the topology. We perform real experiments and show that in practice routers may severely disrupt the operation of Traceroute and cause it to only provide partial information. We propose iTop, an algorithm for inferring the network topology when only partial information is available. iTop constructs a virtual topology, which overestimates the number of network components, and then repeatedly merges links in this topology to resolve it towards the structure of the true network. We perform extensive simulations to compare iTop to state of the art inference algorithms. Results show that iTop significantly outperforms previous approaches and its inferred topologies are within 5% of the original networks for all considered metrics. Additionally, we show that the topologies inferred by iTop significantly improve the performance of fault localization algorithms when compared to other approaches.
Year
DOI
Venue
2015
10.1109/TNSM.2015.2451032
Network and Service Management, IEEE Transactions
Keywords
Field
DocType
Fault localization,Partial information,Topology inference
Logical topology,Topology table,Computer science,Inference,traceroute,Theoretical computer science,Network topology,Network management,The Internet,Topology inference,Distributed computing
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
PP
99
1932-4537
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
3
0.38
19
Authors
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Holbert, B.130.38
Srikar Tati2130.88
S. Silvestri327529.61
Thomas F. La Porta4536.24