Autonomous system ranking by topological characteristics: A comparative study

摘要

The Internet is a highly engineered, large scale complex system serving billions of people worldwide. The whole system is formed by tens of thousands of autonomous networks owned by a different organizations. These autonomous networks are connected to each other through hundreds of thousands of relations which reflect the business partnerships among the network operators as well as the traffic routing in the Internet. Ranking ASes by their topological characteristics allow us to acquire immediate insight on the complex structure of the Internet and make decisions based on various criteria. In this study we compare and contrast six different AS ranking schemes based on the topological features of the ASes: customer degree, provider degree, peer degree, customer-cone size, alpha centrality and betweenness centrality. We report varying levels of agreement/disagreement among the ranking schemes and show that selecting multiple ranking schemes might be necessary to gain a diverse insight on the topology.