On the Eyeshots of BGP Vantage Points

The publicly available BGP vantage points (VPs) have been heavily used by the research community to build the Internet autonomous system (AS) level topology, which is a key input to many applications, such as routing protocol design, performance evaluation and network security issues. However, a detailed study on the eyeshots of these VPs has received little attention before. In this paper, we inspect these VPs carefully. Specifically, we do a measurement work to evaluate the effect of various factors on the eyeshot of each individual VP as well as the relationship between the eyeshots of different VPs. Based on the measurements, we disclose several counterintuitive observations and explain the possible reasons behind, which will help people to better understand the eyeshots of VPs and make better use of them in practice.