Relevance of Massively Distributed Explorations of the Internet Topology: Simulation Results

ABSTRACT
Internet maps are generally constructed using
the traceroute tool from a few sources to many destinations.
It appeared recently that this exploration process gives a
partial and biased view of the real topology, which leads to
the idea of increasing the number of sources to improve the
quality of the maps. In this paper, we present a set of experiments
we have conduced to evaluate the relevance of this
approach. It appears that the statistical properties of the
underlying network have a strong influence on the quality of
the obtained maps, which can be improved using massively
distributed explorations. Conversely, we show that the exploration
process induces some properties on the maps. We
validate our analysis using real-world data and experiments
and its implications.