Enumerating single destination, policy-preferred paths in AS-level Internet topology maps

Using AS-level Internet topology maps to determine accurate AS-level paths is essential for network diagnosis, performance optimization, reliability improvement, resiliency enforcement and topology-aware application development. One significant drawback that we have observed in many studies is simplifying the AS-level topology map of the Internet to an undirected graph, and then using the hop distance as a means to find the shortest paths between ASes. A less significant drawback is restricting the shortest paths to only valley-free paths. Both approaches usually inflate the number of paths between ASes; introduce erroneous paths that do not conform to economic policies; and generate symmetric paths, which in reality is not a rule. As a result, the derived conclusions might be greatly misleading. In this study we introduce a single-destination, policy-preferred path enumeration algorithm which discovers policy consistent paths from all ASes to a destination AS in an AS-level Internet topology graph. Considering that our algorithm's run time complexity is the same as Dijkstra's shortest paths algorithm, we believe that the proposed algorithm will notably enhance the future works that leverage AS-level Internet topology paths.