A distributed measurement method and analysis on Internet hop counts

The topology of Internet has become more and more complicated since it is born. On this background, network measurement is regarded as a basic method to understand the Internet and has always been widely researched. In this paper we focus on the Chinese Internet hops and put forward a practical method to measure the crucial property of large-scale Chinese Internet. By tracing about 25,000 active hosts and 5,000 websites scattered in 12 cities, we collected more than 248,000 records and calculated the weighted average hop counts. It has been found out that secondary cities´ hops are obviously lower than that of central cities. Another interesting discovery is that statistical distribution of secondary cities´ hops exhibit Poisson distribution while central cities´ hops exhibit normal distribution.