Analyzing and modelling the AS-level Internet topology

TL;DR

This paper compares the topological structures of BGP and Traceroute AS graphs, evaluates the rich-club phenomenon in both, and assesses the accuracy of the Interactive Growth model versus the Barabasi-Albert model in replicating Internet topology features.

Contribution

It provides a comparative analysis of different AS topology data sources and evaluates the effectiveness of the IG model in capturing Internet topology characteristics.

Findings

Both AS graphs exhibit the rich-club phenomenon.

The IG model closely matches the tier structure of real AS graphs.

The BA model does not exhibit the rich-club phenomenon.

Abstract

Recently we introduced the rich-club phenomenon as a quantitative metric to characterize the tier structure of the Autonomous Systems level Internet topology (AS graph) and we proposed the Interactive Growth (IG) model, which closely matches the degree distribution and hierarchical structure of the AS graph and compares favourble with other available Internet power-law topology generators. Our research was based on the widely used BGP AS graph obtained from the Oregon BGP routing tables. Researchers argue that Traceroute AS graph, extracted from the traceroute data collected by the CAIDA's active probing tool, Skitter, is more complete and reliable. To be prudent, in this paper we analyze and compare topological structures of Traceroute AS graph and BGP AS graph. Also we compare with two synthetic Internet topologies generated by the IG model and the well-known Barabasi-Albert (BA) model. Result shows that both AS graphs show the rich-club phenomenon and have similar tier structures, which are closely matched by the IG model, however the BA model does not show the rich-club phenomenon at all.