Traceroute measurements are one of our main instruments to shed light onto the structure and properties of today's complex networks such as the Internet. This paper studies the feasibility and infeasibility of inferring the network topology given traceroute data from a worst-case perspective, i.e., without any probabilistic assumptions on, e.g., the nodes' degree distribution. We attend to a scenario where some of the routers are anonymous, and propose two fundamental axioms that model two basic assumptions on the traceroute data: (1) each trace corresponds to a real path in the network, and (2) the routing paths are at most a factor 1 alpha off the shortest paths, for some parameter alpha in (0,1]. In contrast to existing literature that focuses on the cardinality of the set of (often only minimal) inferrable topologies, we argue that a large number of possible topologies alone is often unproblematic, as long as the networks have a similar structure. We hence seek to characterize the set of topologies inferred with our axioms. We introduce the notion of star graphs whose colorings capture the differences among inferred topologies; it also allows us to construct inferred topologies explicitly. We find that in general, inferrable topologies can differ significantly in many important aspects, such as the nodes' distances or the number of triangles. These negative results are complemented by a discussion of a scenario where the trace set is best possible, i.e., "complete". It turns out that while some properties such as the node degrees are still hard to measure, a complete trace set can help to determine global properties such as the connectivity.
Our work is motivated by a series of papers by Acharya and Gouda. @cite_14 , a network tracing theory model is introduced where nodes are irregular'' in the sense that each node appears in at least one trace with its real identifier. @cite_3 , hardness results are derived for this model. However, as pointed out by the authors themselves, the irregular node model---where nodes are anonymous due to high loads---is less relevant in practice and hence they consider strictly anonymous nodes in their follow-up studies @cite_7 . As proved in @cite_7 , the problem is still hard (in the sense that there are many minimal networks corresponding to a trace set), even with only two anonymous nodes, symmetric routing and without aliasing.
@cite_14 @cite_7 @cite_3
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Many systems require information about the topology of networks on the Internet, for purposes like management, efficiency, testing of new protocols and so on. However, ISPs usually do not share the actual topology maps with outsiders; thus, in order to obtain the topology of a network on the Internet, a system must reconstruct it from publicly observable data. The standard method employs traceroute to obtain paths between nodes; next, a topology is generated such that the observed paths occur in the graph. However, traceroute has the problem that some routers refuse to reveal their addresses, and appear as anonymous nodes in traces. Previous research on the problem of topology inference with anonymous nodes has demonstrated that it is at best NP-complete. In this paper, we improve upon this result. In our previous research, we showed that in the special case where nodes may be anonymous in some traces but not in all traces (so all node identifiers are known), there exist trace sets that are generable from multiple topologies. This paper extends our theory of network tracing to the general case (with strictly anonymous nodes), and shows that the problem of computing the network that generated a trace set, given the trace set, has no general solution. The weak version of the problem, which allows an algorithm to output a "small" set of networks- any one of which is the correct one- is also not solvable. Any algorithm guaranteed to output the correct topology outputs at least an exponential number of networks. Our results are surprisingly robust: they hold even when the network is known to have exactly two anonymous nodes, and every node as well as every edge in the network is guaranteed to occur in some trace. On the basis of this result, we suggest that exact reconstruction of network topology requires more powerful tools than traceroute. Computing the topology of a network in the Internet is a problem that has attracted considerable research interest. The usual method is to employ Traceroute, which produces sequences of nodes that occur along the routes from one node (source) to another (destination). In every trace thus produced, a node occurs by either its unique identifier, or by the anonymous identifier "*". We have earlier proved that there exists no algorithm that can take a set of traces produced by running Traceroute on network N and compute one topology which is guaranteed to be the topology of N. This paper proves a much stronger result: no algorithm can produce a small set of topologies that is guaranteed to contain the topology of N, as the size of the solution set is exponentially large. This result holds even when every edge occurs in a trace, all the unique identifiers of all the nodes are known, and the number of nodes that are irregular (anonymous in some traces) is given. On the basis of this strong result, we suggest that efforts to exactly reconstruct network topology should focus on special cases where the solution set is small. In this paper, we model Probabilistic Packet Marking (PPM) schemes for IP traceback as an identification problem of a large number of markers. Each potential marker is associated with a distribution on tags, which are short binary strings. To mark a packet, a marker follows its associated distribution in choosing the tag to write in the IP header. Since there are a large number of (for example, over 4,000) markers, what the victim receives are samples from a mixture of distributions. Essentially, traceback aims to identify individual distribution contributing to the mixture. Guided by this model, we propose Random Packet Marking (RPM), a scheme that uses a simple but effective approach. RPM does not require sophisticated structure relationship among the tags, and employs a hop-by-hop reconstruction similar to AMS [16]. Simulations show improved scalability and traceback accuracy over prior works. For example, in a large network with over 100K nodes, 4,650 markers induce 63 of false positives in terms of edges identification using the AMS marking scheme; while RPM lowers it to 2 . The effectiveness of RPM demonstrates that with prior knowledge of neighboring nodes, a simple and properly designed marking scheme suffices in identifying large number of markers with high accuracy. This paper studies networks where all nodes are distributed on a unit square A=Δ [- [1 2], [1 2]]2 following a Poisson distribution with known density ρ and a pair of nodes separated by an Euclidean distance x are directly connected with probability grρ(x)=Δg(x rρ), independent of the event that any other pair of nodes are directly connected. Here, g:[0,∞)→ [0,1] satisfies the conditions of rotational invariance, nonincreasing monotonicity, integral boundedness, and g(x)=o(1 (x2log2x)) ; further, rρ=√ (logρ+b) (Cρ) where C=∫ℜ2g(||x||)dx and b is a constant. Denote the aforementioned network by G(Xρ,grρ,A). We show that as ρ→ ∞, 1) the distribution of the number of isolated nodes in G(Xρ,grρ,A) converges to a Poisson distribution with mean e-b ; 2) asymptotically almost surely (a.a.s.) there is no component in G(Xρ,grρ,A) of fixed and finite order k >; 1; c) a.a.s. the number of components with an unbounded order is one. Therefore, as ρ→ ∞, the network a.a.s. contains a unique unbounded component and isolated nodes only; a sufficient and necessary condition for G(Xρ,grρ,A) to be a.a.s. connected is that there is no isolated node in the network, which occurs when b→ ∞ as ρ→ ∞. These results expand recent results obtained for connectivity of random geometric graphs from the unit disk model and the fewer results from the log-normal model to the more general and more practical random connection model.