DIMES: Let the Internet Measure Itself

TL;DR

DIMES introduces a distributed infrastructure with thousands of agents to improve the accuracy of Internet mapping, addressing limitations of traditional vantage point-based methods.

Contribution

It proposes a novel, large-scale, distributed measurement system for the Internet, overcoming the limitations of existing single or few vantage point approaches.

Findings

More accurate Internet topology maps obtained with DIMES

Identification of structural properties of the Internet from DIMES data

Demonstration of the scalability and effectiveness of distributed measurement agents

Abstract

Today's Internet maps, which are all collected from a small number of vantage points, are falling short of being accurate. We suggest here a paradigm shift for this task. DIMES is a distributed measurement infrastructure for the Internet that is based on the deployment of thousands of light weight measurement agents around the globe. We describe the rationale behind DIMES deployment, discuss its design trade-offs and algorithmic challenges, and analyze the structure of the Internet as it seen with DIMES.