Ingress Point Spreading: A New Primitive for Adaptive Active Network Mapping

Among outstanding challenges to Internet-wide topology mapping using active probes is balancing efficiency, e.g. induced load and time, with coverage. Toward maximizing probe utility, we introduce Ingress Point Spreading (IPS). IPS utilizes ingress diversity discovered in prior rounds of probing to rank-order available vantage points such that future probes traverse all known paths into a target network. We implement and deploy IPS to probe ∼49k random prefixes drawn from the global BGP table using a distributed collection of vantage points. As compared to existing mapping systems, we discover 12% more unique vertices and 12% more edges using ∼50% fewer probes, in half the time.