Hop count variability

Having a better understanding of the properties of network traffic can help in both evaluating current networking protocols and in creating more realistic models which might help in improving today's Internet service. Based on one month traceroute data from 6 different sources to more than 380 destinations, we present an analysis of how the hop count (HC) varies as seen by IPs in the same Autonomous System (AS) and same country, IPs in the same country but different AS, and IPs in different AS and different country. To the best of our knowledge, no previous research studied the HC overlap as seen by different IPs located in various ASs and countries. Our results show that IPs in the same AS have a high degree of overlap in terms of HC as compared to IPs in the same country. This HC overlap also drops significantly as we compare IPs in different ASs and countries.