Cheleby: A subnet-level internet topology mapping system

Understanding the topological characteristics of the Internet is an important research issue as the Internet grows with no central authority. Internet Topology mapping studies help better understand the dynamics of the Internet backbone network. Knowing underlying topology, researchers can develop new protocols and services or fine-tune existing ones. In this paper, we first discuss issues in subnet-level Internet topology mapping and present approaches to handle them. Then, we introduce Cheleby, an integrated Internet topology mapping system. Cheleby, first, dynamically probes every observed subnetwork in the Internet using a team of PlanetLab nodes around the world. Then, it utilizes efficient algorithms for resolving subnets, IP aliases, and unresponsive routers in collected data to provide subnet-level topologies. Different from current topology mapping systems, Cheleby not only samples the Internet topology but also processes the collected data to build more complete maps. Sample topologies are provided at http://cheleby.cse.unr.edu.