On the performance and improvement of alias resolution methods for Internet core networks

The Internet is a huge interconnection of thousands of networks with different technologies, equipment, configurations, and administrative owners. This, added to the lack of public information about those individual infrastructures, makes it a difficult task to provide a so-called Internet map: a topological map with information of routers, interconnections between routers, and IP addressing configuration. Traditional topology discovery methods based on traceroutes only provide IP addresses in the path between end-nodes. Some of those IP addresses can belong to the same router, and this identification is made by alias resolution methods. Therefore, alias resolution allows to provide router-level map of the Internet with important applications in network simulation, protocol design, network management, network security, network service design, and geolocation. In this paper, alias resolution methods are analyzed in Internet core networks (GlobalNOC, Canet4, and Geant). This allows to identify peculiar behaviors in these core networks, improving alias resolution methods. Simultaneously, reduction methods are used to decrease the number of probing packets in alias resolution methods.