A graph model of the topology of physical, link and network layers of an enterprise network

Many network management tasks require a network topology graph as its input. However, the lack of standard methods of network elements detection, coupled with the incompleteness and heterogeneity of the available topology data, complicate the network topology discovery process. In these conditions it is rational to separate the task of collecting data about the current topology of the network from the tasks of analyzing the collected data and building a topology graph. This approach requires a definition of the modern enterprise networks topology graphs family. Contribution of the paper is the graph model of the topology of physical, link and network layers of a modern enterprise Ethernet and IP based network. A set of theorems proved in the paper allows to infer parts of the topology graph, which are not described by data available on the network devices. Three-step process of building a topology graph using the network data and inference procedures is also proposed in the paper.