Resolving Anonymous Routers in Internet Topology Measurement Studies

Internet measurement studies utilize traceroute to collect path traces from the Internet. A router that does not respond to a traceroute query is referred to as an anonymous router and is represented by a ´*´ in the traceroute output. Anonymous router resolution refers to the task of identifying the occurrences of ´*´s that belong to the same router in the underlying network. This task is an important step in building traceroute-based topology maps and obtaining an optimum solution is shown to be NP-complete. In this paper, we use a novel technique from graph data mining field to build an efficient solution. The results of our experiments on both synthetic and genuine topologies show a significant improvement in accuracy and effectiveness over the existing approaches.