Scalable and accurate identification of AS-level forwarding paths

Traceroute is used heavily by network operators and researchers to identify the IP forwarding path from a source to a destination. In practice, knowing the autonomous system (AS) associated with each hop in the path is also quite valuable. In previous work we showed that the IP-to-AS mapping extracted from BGP routing tables is not sufficient for determining the AS-level forwarding paths. By comparing BGP and traceroute AS paths from multiple vantage points, Z. Morley Mao et al. (2003) proposed heuristics that identify the root causes of the mismatches and fix the inaccurate IP-to-AS mappings. These heuristics, though effective, are labor-intensive and mostly ad hoc. This paper proposes a systematic way to construct accurate IP-to-AS mappings using dynamic programming and iterative improvement. Our algorithm reduces the initial mismatch ratio of 15% between BGP and traceroute AS paths to 5% while changing only 2.9% of the assignments in the initial IP-to-AS mappings. This is in contrast to the results of Z. Morley Mao et al. (2003), where 10% of the assignments were modified and the mismatch ratio was only reduced to 9%. We show that our algorithm is robust and can yield near-optimal results even when the initial mapping is corrupted or when the number of probing sources or destinations is reduced. Our work is a key step towards building a scalable and accurate AS-level traceroute tool