Incentives for BGP Guided IP-Level Topology Discovery

Abstract

Abstract. Internet topology discovery has been an attractive research field during the past decade. In particular, the research community was interested in modeling the network as well as providing efficient tools, mostly based on traceroute, for collecting data. In this paper, we follow this track of rendering traceroute-based exploration more efficient. We discuss incentives for coupling passive monitoring and active measurements. In particular, we show that high-level information, such as BGP updates, might be used to trigger targeted traceroutes. As a result, the network dynamics might be better capture. We also provide a freely available tool for listening to BGP feeds and triggering dedicated traceroutes.