An Organization-Level View of the Internet and its Implications (Extended)

Cai, Xue and Heidemann, John and Krishnamurthy, Balachander and Willinger, Walter
USC/Information Sciences Institute

citation

Xue Cai, John Heidemann, Balachander Krishnamurthy and Walter Willinger 2012. An Organization-Level View of the Internet and its Implications (Extended). Technical Report ISI-TR-2009-679. USC/Information Sciences Institute. [PDF]

abstract

We present a new clustering approach for mapping ASes to organizations, to develop an organization-level view of the Internet’s AS ecosystem. We demonstrate that the choice of clustering method and use of a new (though unconventional) data source in the form of company subsidiary information contained in the U.S. SEC%7eForm 10-K filings are both essential to get accurate results. Evaluating our mapping and validating it against carefully chosen datasets shows few (less than 10%) false negatives for 90% of organizations and few false positives for 60% of our organizations. We apply our map to show the importance of an organization-level view of the Internet by contrasting it with the commonly-used view that considers only an organization’s “main” AS. We find that this main-AS view sometimes severely under-represents the influence of an organization in terms of announced addresses, geographic footprint, and peerings at Internet eXchange Points (IXPs). For example, for 20% of our organizations, the main-AS view detects only 10–60% of the cities covered by the corresponding organization-level view.

reference

@techreport{Cai12b,
  author = {Cai, Xue and Heidemann, John and Krishnamurthy, Balachander and Willinger, Walter},
  title = {An Organization-Level View of the {Internet} and its Implications (Extended)},
  institution = {USC/Information Sciences Institute},
  year = {2012},
  sortdate = {2012-06-01},
  project = {ant, amite, lacrend, lander},
  jsubject = {topology_modeling},
  number = {ISI-TR-2009-679},
  month = jun,
  jlocation = {johnh: pafile},
  keywords = {as-to-org mapping, internet topology},
  copyrightholder = {author},
  url = {https://ant.isi.edu/%7ejohnh/PAPERS/Cai12b.html},
  pdfurl = {https://ant.isi.edu/%7ejohnh/PAPERS/Cai12b.pdf},
  otherurl = {ftp://ftp.isi.edu/isi-pubs/tr-679.pdf},
  myorganization = {USC/Information Sciences Institute}
}