rocketfuel — Rocketfuel ISP topologies (2002-2003)

Description

Router-level and PoP-level maps of Internet service providers (ISPs), measured by Spring, Mahajan, Wetherall and Anderson with Rocketfuel, an ISP topology mapping engine. Rocketfuel ran traceroutes from about 800 vantage points (public traceroute servers), chosen with BGP routing information so as to cross the ISP being mapped, recognized the routers of the ISP and their locations from their DNS names (with ISP-specific naming conventions), and resolved the aliases (the IP addresses of different interfaces of the same router) with a technique of its own. The data set contains three kinds of networks:

routers_<AS> (e.g. routers_1239): the router-level maps of ten ISPs (SIGCOMM 2002; files of 2003), identified by their AS numbers: 1221 (Telstra, Australia), 1239 (Sprintlink, US), 1755 (Ebone, Europe), 2914 (Verio, US), 3257 (Tiscali, Europe), 3356 (Level 3, US), 3967 (Exodus, US), 4755 (VSNL, India), 6461 (Abovenet, US) and 7018 (AT&T, US). Nodes are the routers of the ISP (the full maps of the source, the .cch files), and an undirected edge connects two routers seen directly connected in some traceroute. The maps include the routers that could belong to the ISP, such as chains of routers leading to customers; the vertex property radius allows restricting them to the backbone and gateway routers (radius 0), or to these and their direct neighbors (radius at most 1, the maps mostly used in the paper). The links of the routers to external addresses (outside the ISP) are not included as edges; their number is stored in n_external.
backbone_<AS> (e.g. backbone_1239): the backbone topologies of six of these ISPs (1221, 1239, 1755, 3257, 3967 and 6461), annotated with link weights inferred from the observed paths, assuming shortest-path routing, and with geographical latencies (IMW 2002). Nodes are backbone routers, named by their location and an identifier (these identifiers are not the same as the router identifiers of the routers_<AS> networks, which were assigned anew), and undirected edges are the backbone links.
pops: a PoP-level map of 67 ISPs and of the links between them (SIGCOMM 2003), including the PoPs of two more ISPs that appear only in links to these. Nodes are points of presence (PoPs), i.e. the cities where an ISP has routers, and an undirected edge connects two PoPs that were seen connected in some traceroute, either within an ISP, with link weights inferred as above, or between two ISPs (peering links).

The networks have the following properties:

(Graph) isp (routers_<AS> and backbone_<AS>): the name of the ISP.
(Node) uid (routers_<AS>): the router identifier of the source.
(Node) name (routers_<AS>): the DNS name of the router (or one of its IP addresses, if it has no name).
(Node) location (routers_<AS>): the location of the router, as city, state/country (T if it is ambiguous, e.g. connected to routers in different locations, and ? if it is unknown).
(Node) location_from_dns (routers_<AS>): whether the location was derived from the DNS name (true) or from the connectivity of the router (false).
(Node) backbone (routers_<AS>): whether it is a backbone router (connected to other cities), as opposed to access (gateway) and customer routers.
(Node) no_alias_response (routers_<AS>): whether the router did not respond to alias resolution (and might not be a distinct router).
(Node) radius (routers_<AS>): the distance in hops from a named backbone or gateway router (capped at 5).
(Node) n_external (routers_<AS>): the number of the router's links to addresses outside the ISP.
(Node) name (backbone_<AS>): the name of the router in the source (its location and an identifier).
(Node) location (backbone_<AS>): its location.
(Edge) weight (backbone_<AS>): the inferred link weight.
(Edge) latency (backbone_<AS>): the latency of the link, in milliseconds, estimated from the geographical distance (rounded up).
(Node) name (pops): the name of the PoP in the source (AS:city).
(Node) asn (pops): the AS number of the ISP.
(Node) city (pops): the city of the PoP.
(Edge) count (pops): the number of times the link was observed in the traceroutes.
(Edge) latency (pops): the latency of the link, in milliseconds, estimated from the geographical distance (zero for most links between ISPs in the same city).
(Edge) weight (pops): the inferred link weight (NaN for links between ISPs).
(Edge) peering (pops): whether the link connects two ISPs.

Tags

Technological Communication Weighted Metadata

Added

2026-10-27

Citation

N. Spring, R. Mahajan, D. Wetherall, "Measuring ISP topologies with Rocketfuel." Proceedings of ACM SIGCOMM 2002, 133-145 (2002) 10.1145/633025.633039 Sci-Hub
R. Mahajan, N. Spring, D. Wetherall, T. Anderson, "Inferring link weights using end-to-end measurements." Proceedings of the 2nd ACM SIGCOMM Workshop on Internet Measurement (IMW 2002), 231-236 (2002) 10.1145/637201.637237 Sci-Hub
N. Spring, R. Mahajan, T. Anderson, "The causes of path inflation." Proceedings of ACM SIGCOMM 2003, 113-124 (2003) 10.1145/863955.863970 Sci-Hub

Upstream URL OK

https://research.cs.washington.edu/networking/rocketfuel/
https://web.archive.org/web/2026/https://research.cs.washington.edu/networking/rocketfuel/

Networks

Tip: click on a column header to sort the list, or hover over it for a description.

Column legend

$\left<k\right>$: Mean degree
$\sigma_k$: Standard deviation of the degrees
$\lambda_h$: Largest eigenvalue of the Hashimoto (non-backtracking) matrix
$\tau$: Random walk mixing time
$r$: Degree assortativity
$c$: Global clustering coefficient
$\oslash$: (Pseudo-) diameter
$S$: Relative size of the largest component
NPs: Node properties
EPs: Edge properties

Name	Nodes	Edges	$\left<k\right>$	$\sigma_k$	$\lambda_h$	$\tau$	$r$	$c$	$\oslash$	$S$	Kind	Mode	NPs	EPs	gt	GraphML	GML	csv
routers_1221	3,726	4,504	2.42	5.37	14.62	420.98	-0.22	0.03	17	0.94	Undirected	Unipartite	uid name location location_from_dns backbone no_alias_response radius n_external		94 KiB	128 KiB	127 KiB	113 KiB
routers_1239	10,332	12,912	2.50	8.53	17.21	976.32	-0.31	0.01	17	0.99	Undirected	Unipartite	uid name location location_from_dns backbone no_alias_response radius n_external		266 KiB	361 KiB	357 KiB	319 KiB
routers_1755	300	548	3.65	3.51	6.18	80.14	-0.19	0.10	13	1.00	Undirected	Unipartite	uid name location location_from_dns backbone no_alias_response radius n_external		10 KiB	13 KiB	13 KiB	12 KiB
routers_2914	6,523	9,641	2.96	6.76	14.30	1202.10	-0.27	0.06	20	0.96	Undirected	Unipartite	uid name location location_from_dns backbone no_alias_response radius n_external		166 KiB	219 KiB	219 KiB	200 KiB
routers_3257	506	750	2.96	3.46	8.03	80.24	0.06	0.06	16	1.00	Undirected	Unipartite	uid name location location_from_dns backbone no_alias_response radius n_external		16 KiB	21 KiB	20 KiB	18 KiB
routers_3356	1,786	6,917	7.75	15.03	42.19	69.76	0.02	0.13	12	1.00	Undirected	Unipartite	uid name location location_from_dns backbone no_alias_response radius n_external		47 KiB	69 KiB	70 KiB	62 KiB
routers_3967	447	921	4.12	3.91	7.94	124.41	-0.20	0.15	14	0.95	Undirected	Unipartite	uid name location location_from_dns backbone no_alias_response radius n_external		13 KiB	18 KiB	17 KiB	16 KiB
routers_4755	291	334	2.30	2.93	4.87	109.73	-0.15	0.03	14	0.78	Undirected	Unipartite	uid name location location_from_dns backbone no_alias_response radius n_external		10 KiB	12 KiB	12 KiB	10 KiB
routers_6461	654	1,332	4.07	5.40	9.87	52.73	-0.19	0.11	11	1.00	Undirected	Unipartite	uid name location location_from_dns backbone no_alias_response radius n_external		21 KiB	27 KiB	26 KiB	23 KiB
routers_7018	11,800	14,293	2.42	5.70	16.79	849.39	-0.45	0.01	18	1.00	Undirected	Unipartite	uid name location location_from_dns backbone no_alias_response radius n_external		281 KiB	389 KiB	380 KiB	358 KiB
backbone_1221	108	153	2.83	3.00	4.87	66.93	-0.44	0.18	8	0.96	Undirected	Unipartite	name location	weight latency	5 KiB	6 KiB	6 KiB	5 KiB
backbone_1239	315	972	6.17	6.86	12.51	39.39	-0.28	0.22	10	1.00	Undirected	Unipartite	name location	weight latency	12 KiB	15 KiB	14 KiB	12 KiB
backbone_1755	87	161	3.70	2.02	4.10	31.66	-0.02	0.16	11	1.00	Undirected	Unipartite	name location	weight latency	4 KiB	6 KiB	5 KiB	5 KiB
backbone_3257	161	328	4.07	3.94	6.87	36.88	-0.13	0.07	10	1.00	Undirected	Unipartite	name location	weight latency	7 KiB	9 KiB	8 KiB	7 KiB
backbone_3967	79	147	3.72	2.15	3.71	33.90	-0.20	0.16	10	1.00	Undirected	Unipartite	name location	weight latency	4 KiB	5 KiB	5 KiB	4 KiB
backbone_6461	141	374	5.30	3.48	6.70	32.54	-0.11	0.13	8	0.98	Undirected	Unipartite	name location	weight latency	6 KiB	8 KiB	7 KiB	6 KiB
pops	2,113	6,632	6.28	9.81	26.14	56.08	0.02	0.23	12	1.00	Undirected	Unipartite	name asn city	count latency weight peering	112 KiB	155 KiB	149 KiB	133 KiB

Ridiculograms^*

^* These are automatically generated force-directed visualizations, and can be quite meaningless for networks both big and small. They should not be taken seriously as sources of scientific insight. See here for a discussion.