TY - GEN

T1 - AS relationships, customer cones, and validation

AU - Luckie, Matthew

AU - Huffaker, Bradley

AU - Dhamdhere, Amogh

AU - Giotsas, Vasileios

AU - Claffy, Kc

N1 - © ACM, 2013. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here for your personal use. Not for redistribution. The definitive Version of Record was published in IMC '13 Proceedings of the 2013 conference on Internet measurement conference http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2504730.2504735

PY - 2013

Y1 - 2013

N2 - Business relationships between ASes in the Internet are typically confidential, yet knowledge of them is essential to understand many aspects of Internet structure, performance, dynamics, and evolution. We present a new algorithm to infer these relationships using BGP paths. Unlike previous approaches, our algorithm does not assume the presence (or seek to maximize the number) of valley-free paths, instead relying on three assumptions about the Internet's inter-domain structure: (1) an AS enters into a provider relationship to become globally reachable; and (2) there exists a peering clique of ASes at the top of the hierarchy, and (3) there is no cycle of p2c links. We assemble the largest source of validation data for AS-relationship inferences to date, validating 34.6% of our 126,082 c2p and p2p inferences to be 99.6% and 98.7% accurate, respectively. Using these inferred relationships, we evaluate three algorithms for inferring each AS's customer cone, defined as the set of ASes an AS can reach using customer links. We demonstrate the utility of our algorithms for studying the rise and fall of large transit providers over the last fifteen years, including recent claims about the flattening of the AS-level topology and the decreasing influence of "tier-1" ASes on the global Internet.

AB - Business relationships between ASes in the Internet are typically confidential, yet knowledge of them is essential to understand many aspects of Internet structure, performance, dynamics, and evolution. We present a new algorithm to infer these relationships using BGP paths. Unlike previous approaches, our algorithm does not assume the presence (or seek to maximize the number) of valley-free paths, instead relying on three assumptions about the Internet's inter-domain structure: (1) an AS enters into a provider relationship to become globally reachable; and (2) there exists a peering clique of ASes at the top of the hierarchy, and (3) there is no cycle of p2c links. We assemble the largest source of validation data for AS-relationship inferences to date, validating 34.6% of our 126,082 c2p and p2p inferences to be 99.6% and 98.7% accurate, respectively. Using these inferred relationships, we evaluate three algorithms for inferring each AS's customer cone, defined as the set of ASes an AS can reach using customer links. We demonstrate the utility of our algorithms for studying the rise and fall of large transit providers over the last fifteen years, including recent claims about the flattening of the AS-level topology and the decreasing influence of "tier-1" ASes on the global Internet.

KW - ASL relationships

KW - Customer cones

KW - Routing policies

U2 - 10.1145/2504730.2504735

DO - 10.1145/2504730.2504735

M3 - Conference contribution/Paper

AN - SCOPUS:84890050382

SN - 9781450319539

SP - 243

EP - 256

BT - IMC '13 Proceedings of the 2013 conference on Internet measurement conference

PB - ACM

CY - New York

T2 - 13th ACM Internet Measurement Conference, IMC 2013

Y2 - 23 October 2013 through 25 October 2013

ER -