Heuristics for Internet map discovery

Mercator is a program that uses hop-limited probes-the same primitive used in traceroute-to infer an Internet map. It uses informed random address probing to carefully exploring the IP address space when determining router adjacencies, uses source-route capable routers wherever possible to enhance the fidelity of the resulting map, and employs novel mechanisms for resolving aliases (interfaces belonging to the same router). This paper describes the design of these heuristics and our experiences with Mercator, and presents some preliminary analysis of the resulting Internet map.