Informatisches Kolloquium Sommersemester 2008

Montag, 7. April 2008

Prof. A.E. Krzesinski
Department of Mathematical Sciences
University of Stellenbosch
South Africa

Mapping the African Internet

The decentralized nature of the Internet and the complexity and diversity of its infrastructures, owners and operators together with the market-driven incentives for providers to obscure their network infrastructures have made comprehensive knowledge of Internet connectivity increasingly difficult to obtain.

The goal of this project is to determine accurately and anonymously where Internet resources are logically and geographically located in the African Internet. The resources include autonomous systems (ASs), peering relationships, Internet service provider (ISP) points of presence (POPs), routers and links.

This seminar describes the methods used to generate maps of the African Internet both at the router level and at the autonomous system (AS) level. The traceroute utility was used to collect router level information on the Internet. BGP routing tables were used to collect AS information.

We developed software to automate the sending of traceroute probes to selected IP addresses, to store the information produced by the traceroute data and to transform the data into adjacency matrices. The adjacency matrices, together with geographical data concerning the location of the routers, were used to draw various maps showing the Internet topology.

CV

Anthony Krzesinski obtained the MSc from the University of Cape Town and the PhD from Cambridge University, England. He is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Stellenbosch. His research interests centre on the performance evaluation of telecommunication networks.

Kontakt

Dr. Guido Gryczan
Telefon 2310