Efficient discovery of network topology and routing policy in the Internet

Efficient discovery of network topology and routing policy in the Internet by Neil Timothy Spring Co-Chairs of Supervisory Committee: Associate Professor David J. Wetherall Department of Computer Science and Engineering Professor Thomas E. Anderson Department of Computer Science and Engineering Little is known about the structure and configuration of the ISP networks that constitute the Internet. This shortage of information is a consequence of a fundamental principle of the Internet architecture: that constituent ISPs are administered independently. ISP networks connect by a narrow interface that supports the delivery of data but hides the implementation and behavior of a network from its neighbors. One consequence of this isolation between networks is that, although operators have inside information for their own networks, it is difficult to recognize and fix problems that span administrative boundaries. In this dissertation, I focus on what can be discovered by an outsider: a user or researcher without access to privileged information. I show that the network topologies and routing policies of ISP networks can be discovered despite the narrowness of the interface between them. To do this, I develop and evaluate techniques to measure structured, routerlevel ISP network topologies and infer intra-domain and peering routing policies. To make these techniques efficient, I use a philosophy of choosing to collect only measurements likely to yield new information. This enables the techniques to run on a large network measurement platform, composed of hundreds of public traceroute servers, to produce an accurate result. I applied and evaluated my techniques to map ten diverse ISP networks and characterize the routing policies of 65 ISP networks. The results are a set of ISP topologies that are several times more complete than previous maps and the first quantitative study of peering routing policy. This data highlights the diversity of ISP networks and can be used by others to better understand network operation and protocol design choices.