Revisiting Subnet Inference WISE-ly

Abstract

Since the late 90’s, the Internet topology discovery has been an attractive and important research topic, leading, among others, to multiple probing and data analysis tools developed by the research community. This paper looks at the particular problem of discovering subnets (i.e., a set of devices that are located on the same connection medium and that can communicate directly with each other at the link layer). In this paper, we first show that the use of traffic engineering policies may increase the difficulty of subnet inference. We carefully characterize those difficulties and quantify their prevalence in the wild. Next, we introduce WISE (Wide and lInear Subnet inferencE), a novel tool for subnet inference designed to deal with those issues and able to discover subnets on wide ranges of IP addresses in a linear time. Using two groundtruth networks, we demonstrate that WISE performs better than state-of-the-art tools while being competitive in terms of subnet accuracy. We also show, through large-scale measurements, that the selection of vantage point with WISE does not matter in terms of subnet accuracy. Finally, all our code (WISE, data processing, results plotting) and collected data are freely available. Peer reviewed