Study on network topology discovery in IP networks

Nowadays, network is becoming more and more complicated. Topology discovery becomes a hot research point as it is of high importance to network management. Current topology discovery methods have been investigated in this paper, which can be classified as common-protocol-based method, router-protocol-based method and SNMP-protocol-based method, all of which are specifically discussed in the following sections. The advantages, disadvantages and using scope of every method are analyzed and finally a comparison is made.