Characterizing and analysis of the flattening Internet topology

Despite significant efforts to qualitatively describe the flattening trends of the Internet topology, there is few large-scale quantitative measurement study of such trends from the perspective of inter-domain routing. In this paper, we analyze the evolutionary trends of the Internet hierarchy and the interconnection policies, using fifteen years of historical datasets from RouteViews and RIPE. We find that the Internet is becoming flatter mainly due to bypassing the Tier-1 ISPs on AS-paths and the notable increase of peer-to-peer links. We also examine the global routing infrastructure, and find that IXPs are increasing rapidly in number and expand to broad areas around the world, which greatly facilitates the expansion of major content providers and content delivery networks to most regions in the world. Finally we discuss the impact and implication of this trend. Our measurement results strongly confirm the flattening trends of the Internet, and will help advance our understanding of the Internet AS-level ecosystem and the design of future Internet architecture.

[1]  Lixin Gao,et al.  On inferring autonomous system relationships in the Internet , 2000, Globecom '00 - IEEE. Global Telecommunications Conference. Conference Record (Cat. No.00CH37137).

[2]  D. Clark,et al.  Complexity of Internet Interconnections: Technology, Incentives and Implications for Policy , 2007 .

[3]  Bruce M. Maggs,et al.  On the impact of route monitor selection , 2007, IMC '07.

[4]  Yuval Shavitt,et al.  Topological trends of internet content providers , 2012, SIMPLEX '12.

[5]  Farnam Jahanian,et al.  Internet inter-domain traffic , 2010, SIGCOMM '10.

[6]  Daniel Massey,et al.  Collecting the internet AS-level topology , 2005, CCRV.

[7]  Zongpeng Li,et al.  The Flattening Internet Topology: Natural Evolution, Unsightly Barnacles or Contrived Collapse? , 2008, PAM.

[8]  Lixia Zhang,et al.  Quantifying the Pitfalls of Traceroute in AS Connectivity Inference , 2010, PAM.

[9]  Michalis Faloutsos,et al.  Lord of the links: a framework for discovering missing links in the internet topology , 2009, IEEE/ACM Trans. Netw..

[10]  Brice Augustin,et al.  IXPs: mapped? , 2009, IMC '09.

[11]  Walter Willinger,et al.  The (In)Completeness of the Observed Internet AS-level Structure , 2010, IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking.

[12]  Rami Cohen,et al.  The Internet Dark Matter - on the Missing Links in the AS Connectivity Map , 2006, Proceedings IEEE INFOCOM 2006. 25TH IEEE International Conference on Computer Communications.

[13]  Yang Xiang,et al.  Internet Flattening: Monitoring and Analysis of Inter-Domain Routing , 2011, 2011 IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC).

[14]  Dmitri V. Krioukov,et al.  AS relationships: inference and validation , 2006, CCRV.

[15]  Jia Wang,et al.  Towards an accurate AS-level traceroute tool , 2003, SIGCOMM '03.

[16]  Randy H. Katz,et al.  Characterizing the Internet hierarchy from multiple vantage points , 2002, Proceedings.Twenty-First Annual Joint Conference of the IEEE Computer and Communications Societies.

[17]  Amogh Dhamdhere,et al.  Twelve Years in the Evolution of the Internet Ecosystem , 2011, IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking.