Computing the types of the relationships between autonomous systems

The problem of computing the types of the relationships between Internet autonomous systems is investigated. We refer to the model introduced in (ref.1), (ref.2) that bases the discovery of such relationships on the analysis of the AS paths extracted from the BGP routing tables. We characterize the time complexity of the above problem, showing both NP-completeness results and efficient algorithms for solving specific cases. Motivated by the hardness of the general problem, we propose heuristics based on a novel paradigm and show their effectiveness against publicly available data sets. The experiments put in evidence that our heuristics performs significantly better than state of the art heuristics.