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.
In the field of , topologies are explored using pairwise end-to-end measurements, without the cooperation of nodes along these paths. This approach is quite flexible and applicable in various contexts, e.g., in social networks @cite_6 . For a good discussion of this approach as well as results for a routing model along shortest and second shortest paths see @cite_6 . For example, @cite_6 shows that for sparse random graphs, a relatively small number of cooperating participants is sufficient to discover a network fairly well.
@cite_6
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We consider the task of topology discovery of sparse random graphs using end-to-end random measurements (e.g., delay) between a subset of nodes, referred to as the participants. The rest of the nodes are hidden, and do not provide any information for topology discovery. We consider topology discovery under two routing models: (a) the participants exchange messages along the shortest paths and obtain end-to-end measurements, and (b) additionally, the participants exchange messages along the second shortest path. For scenario (a), our proposed algorithm results in a sub-linear edit-distance guarantee using a sub-linear number of uniformly selected participants. For scenario (b), we obtain a much stronger result, and show that we can achieve consistent reconstruction when a sub-linear number of uniformly selected nodes participate. This implies that accurate discovery of sparse random graphs is tractable using an extremely small number of participants. We finally obtain a lower bound on the number of participants required by any algorithm to reconstruct the original random graph up to a given edit distance. We also demonstrate that while consistent discovery is tractable for sparse random graphs using a small number of participants, in general, there are graphs which cannot be discovered by any algorithm even with a significant number of participants, and with the availability of end-to-end information along all the paths between the participants. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Random Struct. Alg., 2013 Minimal delay routing is a fundamental task in networks. Since delays depend on the (potentially unpredictable) traffic distribution, online delay optimization can be quite challenging. While uncertainty about the current network delays may make the current routing choices sub-optimal, the algorithm can nevertheless try to learn the traffic patterns and keep adapting its choice of routing paths so as to perform nearly as well as the best static path. This online shortest path problem is a special case of online linear optimization, a problem in which an online algorithm must choose, in each round, a strategy from some compact set S ⊆ Rd so as to try to minimize a linear cost function which is only revealed at the end of the round. Kalai and Vempala[4] gave an algorithm for such problems in the transparent feedback model, where the entire cost function is revealed at the end of the round. Here we present an algorithm for online linear optimization in the more challenging opaque feedback model, in which only the cost of the chosen strategy is revealed at the end of the round. In the special case of shortest paths, opaque feedback corresponds to the notion that in each round the algorithm learns only the end-to-end cost of the chosen path, not the cost of every edge in the network.We also present a second algorithm for online shortest paths, which solves the shortest-path problem using a chain of online decision oracles, one at each node of the graph. This has several advantages over the online linear optimization approach. First, it is effective against an adaptive adversary, whereas our linear optimization algorithm assumes an oblivious adversary. Second, even in the case of an oblivious adversary, the second algorithm performs better than the first, as measured by their additive regret. We present a study of anonymized data capturing a month of high-level communication activities within the whole of the Microsoft Messenger instant-messaging system. We examine characteristics and patterns that emerge from the collective dynamics of large numbers of people, rather than the actions and characteristics of individuals. The dataset contains summary properties of 30 billion conversations among 240 million people. From the data, we construct a communication graph with 180 million nodes and 1.3 billion undirected edges, creating the largest social network constructed and analyzed to date. We report on multiple aspects of the dataset and synthesized graph. We find that the graph is well-connected and robust to node removal. We investigate on a planetary-scale the oft-cited report that people are separated by "six degrees of separation" and find that the average path length among Messenger users is 6.6. We find that people tend to communicate more with each other when they have similar age, language, and location, and that cross-gender conversations are both more frequent and of longer duration than conversations with the same gender. Knowledge of a network's topology and internal characteristics such as delay times or losses is crucial to maintain seamless operation of network services. Network tomography is a useful approach to infer such knowledge from end-to-end measurements between nodes at the periphery of the network, as it does not require cooperation of routers and other internal nodes. Most current tomography algorithms are single-source methods, which use multicast probes or synchronized unicast packet trains to measure covariances between destinations from a single vantage point and recover a tree topology from these measurements. Multi-source tomography, on the other hand, uses pairwise hop counts or latencies and consequently overcomes the difficulties associated with obtaining measurements for single-source methods. However, topology recovery is complicated by the fact that the paths along which measurements are taken do not form a tree in the network. Motivated by recent work suggesting that these measurements can be well-approximated by tree metrics, we present two algorithms that use selective pairwise distance measurements between peripheral nodes to construct a tree whose end-to-end distances approximate those in the network. Our first algorithm accommodates measurements perturbed by additive noise, while our second considers a novel noise model that captures missing measurements and the network's deviations from a tree topology. Both algorithms provably use O (p polylog p) pairwise measurements to construct a tree approximation on p end hosts. We present extensive simulated and real-world experiments to evaluate both of our algorithms. We consider the point-to-point (approximate) shortest-path query problem, which is the following generalization of the classical single-source (SSSP) and all-pairs shortest-path (APSP) problems: we are first presented with a network (graph). A so-called preprocessing algorithm may compute certain information (a data structure or index) to prepare for the next phase. After this preprocessing step, applications may ask shortest-path or distance queries, which should be answered as fast as possible. Due to its many applications in areas such as transportation, networking, and social science, this problem has been considered by researchers from various communities (sometimes under different names): algorithm engineers construct fast route planning methods; database and information systems researchers investigate materialization tradeoffs, query processing on spatial networks, and reachability queries; and theoretical computer scientists analyze distance oracles and sparse spanners. Related problems are considered for compact routing and distance labeling schemes in networking and distributed computing and for metric embeddings in geometry as well. In this survey, we review selected approaches, algorithms, and results on shortest-path queries from these fields, with the main focus lying on the tradeoff between the index size and the query time. We survey methods for general graphs as well as specialized methods for restricted graph classes, in particular for those classes with arguable practical significance such as planar graphs and complex networks. Materialization and hierarchical routing algorithms are becoming important tools in querying databases for the shortest paths in time-critical applications like Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS), due to the growing size of their spatial graph databases [16]. A hierarchical routing algorithm decomposes the original graph into a set of fragment graphs and a boundary graph which summarizes the fragment graphs. A fully materialized hierarchical routing algorithm pre-computes and stores the shortest-path view and the shortest-path-cost view for the graph fragments as well as for the boundary graph [9]. The storage cost of the fully materialized approach can be reduced by a virtual or a hybrid materialization approach, where few or none of the relevant views are pre-computed. This paper explores the effect of materializing individual views for the storage overhead and computation time of hierarchical routing algorithms. Our experiments with the Twin Cities metropolitan road-map show that materializing the shortest-path-cost view for the boundary graph provides the best savings in computation time, for a given amount of storage and a small number of fragments. Materializing the relevant part of the shortest-path-cost view for the fragment graphs provides the next best savings, followed by materializing the shortest-path view for the boundary graph. Virtual shortest-path-view on fragments can reduce storage costs by an order of magnitude or more for large graphs Betweenness is a measure of the centrality of a node in a network, and is normally calculated as the fraction of shortest paths between node pairs that pass through the node of interest. Betweenness is, in some sense, a measure of the influence a node has over the spread of information through the network. By counting only shortest paths, however, the conventional definition implicitly assumes that information spreads only along those shortest paths. Here, we propose a betweenness measure that relaxes this assumption, including contributions from essentially all paths between nodes, not just the shortest, although it still gives more weight to short paths. The measure is based on random walks, counting how often a node is traversed by a random walk between two other nodes. We show how our measure can be calculated using matrix methods, and give some examples of its application to particular networks. Greedy geographic routing is attractive for large multi-hop wireless networks because of its simple and distributed operation. However, it may easily result in dead ends or hotspots when routing in a network with obstacles (regions without sufficient connectivity to forward messages). In this paper, we propose a distributed routing algorithm that combines greedy geographic routing with two non-Euclidian distance metrics, chosen so as to provide load balanced routing around obstacles and hotspots. The first metric, Local Shortest Path, is used to achieve high probability of progress, while the second metric, Weighted Distance Gain, is used to select a desirable node among those that provide progress. The proposed Load Balanced Local Shortest Path (LBLSP) routing algorithm provides loop freedom, guarantees delivery when a path exists, is able to efficiently route around obstacles, and provides good load balancing. Large probabilistic graphs arise in various domains spanning from social networks to biological and communication networks. An important query in these graphs is the k nearestneighbor query, which involves finding and reporting the k closest nodes to a specific node. This query assumes the existence of a measure of the “proximity” or the “distance” between any two nodes in the graph. To that end, we propose various novel distance functions that extend well known notions of classical graph theory, such as shortest paths and random walks. We argue that many meaningful distance functions are computationally intractable to compute exactly. Thus, in order to process nearest-neighbor queries, we resort to Monte Carlo sampling and exploit novel graph-transformation ideas and pruning opportunities. In our extensive experimental analysis, we explore the trade-offs of our approximation algorithms and demonstrate that they scale well on real-world probabilistic graphs with tens of millions of edges. Considerable attention has been focused on the properties of graphs derived from Internet measurements. Router-level topologies collected via traceroute-like methods have led some to conclude that the router graph of the Internet is well modeled as a power-law random graph. In such a graph, the degree distribution of nodes follows a distribution with a power-law tail. We argue that the evidence to date for this conclusion is at best insufficient We show that when graphs are sampled using traceroute-like methods, the resulting degree distribution can differ sharply from that of the underlying graph. For example, given a sparse Erdos-Renyi random graph, the subgraph formed by a collection of shortest paths from a small set of random sources to a larger set of random destinations can exhibit a degree distribution remarkably like a power-law. We explore the reasons for how this effect arises, and show that in such a setting, edges are sampled in a highly biased manner. This insight allows us to formulate tests for determining when sampling bias is present. When we apply these tests to a number of well-known datasets, we find strong evidence for sampling bias. In this paper a model that handles costs of turns in route planning is defined, investigated and discussed. Costs are traditionally attached to edges in a graph. For some important route planning problems other costs can be identified, namely costs that appear when leaving one edge and entering the next. Examples are turn restrictions, the turning angle, or the simple necessity to turn. Such costs cannot be stored as attributes of nodes or edges in the graph, and they cannot be handled correctly by shortest path algorithms without modifications. Turn costs can be represented by a pseudo-dual graph in a way that shortest path algorithms run without modifications. Although the idea is not new, it has not found much interest in the literature. The pseudo-dual graph is defined here in a new way, it is systematically investigated, and some practical applications are shown. Concentrating strictly on topology, it turns out that the pseudo-dual graph is conceptually cleaner and more efficient in route planning than alternative, currently used ways to deal with turn costs. The discussed applications are from the field of pedestrian navigation, which gave rise to this research. Small changes in the network topology can have dramatic effects on its capacity to disseminate information. In this paper, we consider the problem of adding a small number of ghost edges in the network in order to minimize the average shortest-path distance between nodes, towards a smaller-world network. We formalize the problem of suggesting ghost edges and we propose a novel method for quickly evaluating the importance of ghost edges in sparse graphs. Through experiments on real and synthetic data sets, we demonstrate that our approach performs very well, for a varying range of conditions, and it outperforms sensible baselines. Given a large city represented by nodes and arcs, with a subset of these nodes having people required to be evacuated in a disaster situation, and a subset of destination nodes where the people may be taken for safety, the evacuation route planner finds routes in this network to evacuate the people in minimum possible time. Evacuation route planning in pre-known disasters such as hurricanes is of utmost importance for civic authorities. Computing such evacuation routes in a large graph with road infrastructure constraints such as road capacities and travelling times can be challenging. The Capacity Constrained Route Planner (CCRP) is a well studied heuristic algorithm proposed by Lu, George and Shekhar for solving this problem. It uses shortest path computations as a basis for finding and scheduling possible evacuation paths in the graph. However, the algorithm fails to scale to very large graphs. Other algorithms based on CCRP like CCRP++ and Incremental Data Structure based CCRP have been proposed to scale them to larger graphs. In this paper, we analyze these algorithms from performance perspective and suggest a faster algorithm by extending the CCRP algorithm that avoids recomputing partial paths. We have carried out experiments on various graph structures which show a vast improvement in runtime without impacting the optimality of CCRP results. For instance, for the city of Oldenburg with 382285 people, 6105 nodes and 7034 edges, our algorithm produced an evacuation plan in 2.6 seconds as compared to 123.8 seconds by CCRP and 9.3 seconds by CCRP++. Several localized routing protocols (see Bose, P. and Morin, P., Proc. 10th Annual Int. Symp. on Algorithms and Computation ISAAC, 1999) guarantee the delivery of packets when the underlying network topology is the Delaunay triangulation of all wireless nodes. However, it is expensive to construct the Delaunay triangulation in a distributed manner. Given a set of wireless nodes, we more accurately model the network as a unit-disk graph, UDG, in which a link between two nodes exists only if the distance between them is at most the maximum transmission range. Given a graph H, a spanning subgraph G of H is a t-spanner if the length of the shortest path connecting any two points in G is no more than t times the length of the shortest path connecting the two points in H. We present a novel localized networking protocol that constructs a planar 2.5-spanner of UDG, called the localized Delaunay triangulation, as network topology. It contains all edges that are in both the UDG and the Delaunay triangulation of all wireless nodes. Our experiments show that the delivery rates of existing localized routing protocols are increased when localized Delaunay triangulation is used instead of several previously proposed topologies. The total communication cost of our networking protocol is O(n log n) bits. Moreover, the computation cost of each node u is O(d sub u log d sub u ), where d sub u is the number of 1-hop neighbors of u in UDG. Automated network control and management has been a long standing target of network protocols. We address in this paper the question of automated protocol design, where distributed networked nodes have to cooperate to achieve a common goal without a priori knowledge on which information to exchange or the network topology. While reinforcement learning has often been proposed for this task, we propose here to apply recent methods from semi-supervised deep neural networks which are focused on graphs. Our main contribution is an approach for applying graph-based deep learning on distributed routing protocols via a novel neural network architecture named Graph-Query Neural Network. We apply our approach to the tasks of shortest path and max-min routing. We evaluate the learned protocols in cold-start and also in case of topology changes. Numerical results show that our approach is able to automatically develop efficient routing protocols for those two use-cases with accuracies larger than 95 . We also show that specific properties of network protocols, such as resilience to packet loss, can be explicitly included in the learned protocol. A complex network can be modeled as a graph representing the ''who knows who'' relationship. In the context of graph theory for social networks, the notion of centrality is used to assess the relative importance of nodes in a given network topology. For example, in a network composed of large dense clusters connected through only a few links, the nodes involved in those links are particularly critical as far as the network survivability is concerned. This may also impact any application running on top of it. Such information can be exploited for various topological maintenance issues to prevent congestion and disruption. This can also be used offline to identify the most important actors in large social interaction graphs. Several forms of centrality have been proposed so far. Yet, they suffer from imperfections: initially designed for small social graphs, they are either of limited use (degree centrality), either incompatible in a distributed setting (e.g. random walk betweenness centrality). In this paper we introduce a novel form of centrality: the second order centrality which can be computed in a distributed manner. This provides locally each node with a value reflecting its relative criticity and relies on a random walk visiting the network in an unbiased fashion. To this end, each node records the time elapsed between visits of that random walk (called return time in the sequel) and computes the standard deviation (or second order moment) of such return times. The key point is that central nodes see regularly the random walk compared to other topology nodes. Both through theoretical analysis and simulation, we show that the standard deviation can be used to accurately identify critical nodes as well as to globally characterize graphs topology in a distributed way. We finally compare our proposal to well-known centralities to assess its competitivity. In this paper we present a novel approach to determine the exact diameter (longest shortest path length) of large graphs, in particular of the nowadays frequently studied small world networks. Typical examples include social networks, gene networks, web graphs and internet topology networks. Due to complexity issues, the diameter is often calculated based on a sample of only a fraction of the nodes in the graph, or some approximation algorithm is applied. We instead propose an exact algorithm that uses various lower and upper bounds as well as effective node selection and pruning strategies in order to evaluate only the critical nodes which ultimately determine the diameter. We will show that our algorithm is able to quickly determine the exact diameter of various large datasets of small world networks with millions of nodes and hundreds of millions of links, whereas before only approximations could be given. Position-based routing, as it is used by protocols like Greedy Perimeter Stateless Routing (GPSR) [5], is very well suited for highly dynamic environments such as inter-vehicle communication on highways. However, it has been discussed that radio obstacles [4], as they are found in urban areas, have a significant negative impact on the performance of position-based routing. In prior work [6] we presented a position-based approach which alleviates this problem and is able to find robust routes within city environments. It is related to the idea of position-based source routing as proposed in [1] for terminode routing. The algorithm needs global knowledge of the city topology as it is provided by a static street map. Given this information the sender determines the junctions that have to be traversed by the packet using the Dijkstra shortest path algorithm. Forwarding between junctions is then done in a position-based fashion. In this short paper we show how position-based routing can be aplied to a city scenario without assuming that nodes have access to a static street map and without using source routing. This letter addresses the issue of learning shortest paths in complex networks, which is of utmost importance in real-life navigation. The approach has been partially motivated by recent progress in characterizing navigation problems in networks, having as extreme situations the completely ignorant (random) walker and the rich directed walker, which can pay for information that will guide to the target node along the shortest path. A learning framework based on a first-visit Monte Carlo algorithm is implemented, together with four independent measures that characterize the learning process. The methodology is applied to a number of network classes, as well as to networks constructed from actual data. The results indicate that the navigation difficulty and learning velocity are strongly related to the network topology. Load balanced routing in a network, i.e., minimizing the maximum traffic load any node carries for unsplittable flows, is a well known NP-hard problem. Finding practical algorithms remains a long standing challenge. In this paper we propose greedy routing using virtual coordinates that achieves both small path stretch ratio (compared to shortest path) and small load balancing ratio (compared to optimal load balanced routing), in a large scale wireless sensor network deployed densely inside a geometric domain with complex shape. We first provide a greedy routing scheme on a disk with a stretch ratio of at most 2, and under which the maximum load is a factor 4√2 smaller than the maximum load under shortest path routing. This is the first simple routing scheme with a small stretch that has been proven to outperform shortest path routing in terms of load balancing. Then we transform a network of arbitrary shape to a disk by an area preserving map φ. We show that both the path length and the maximum traffic load in the original network only increases by an additional factor of d2, where d is the maximum length stretch of φ. Combined with the result on a disk we again achieve both bounded stretch and bounded load balancing ratio. Our simulation results evaluated the practical performance on both quality measures.