Discovering Topologies at Router Level: Part II

Measurement and monitoring of network topologies are essential tasks in current network scenarios. Indeed, due to their utility in planning, management, security, and reliability of network infrastructures, effective and efficient approaches and tools for discovering large topologies are gaining more and more attention from both Application Service Providers and network administrators. In this paper we propose a hybrid methodology and its implementation in a software platform we called Hynetd. We present the architecture, some novel algorithms and methods adopted in the discovery chain, and a performance evaluation over two network scenarios: a small scale test-bed and a large scale MAN in the heart of Napoli (Italy). We provide experimental results confirming and improving those previously obtained by a prototype of Hynetd. In addition a comparison with a commercial tool is presented. Achieved results, in terms of accuracy, discovery time, and traffic injected, are very encouraging in both considered scenarios.