Modelling a tractable and annotated ISP's router-level topology based on statistical data and geolocation mapping

Building a tractable and annotated router-level topology models is critical for researchers to evaluate the performance of networking protocols, to assess the effectiveness of security techniques to protect the network from attacks, etc. Yet, obtaining a tractable router-level topology is a difficult task. Furthermore it is harder to obtain various routers' and links' annotations (e.g. link traffics, link roles, router roles) than the routers' interconnectivity relationship. In this paper, the authors present a simple and practical method to model a tractable and annotated router-level topology. By mapping routers with same geolocation into one logical router, the authors generate a logical route-level topology with as small a cost as possible in terms of measurement overhead and use statistical data to estimate the traffic among routers. By comparing with partial true topology in geolocation, the logical router level topology is reasonable accurate. Throughout this paper the authors describe our method by measuring China Telecom's router-level topology.