Ethernet Topology Discovery for Networks with Incomplete Information

In this paper we investigate the problem of finding a layer-2 network topology when the information available from SNMP MIB is incomplete. We prove that finding a network topology in this case is NP-hard. We further prove that deciding whether the given information defines a unique network topology is a co-NP-hard problem. We show that if there is a single node r such that every other network node sees it, then the network topology can be discovered in polynomial (in the number of network ports) time. Finally, we design a polynomial time heuristic algorithm to discover a topology when the information available from SNMP MIB is incomplete and conduct extensive experiments with it to determine how often the algorithm succeeds in finding topology. Our results indicate that our algorithm discovers the network topology in close to 100% of all test cases.

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