Inferring business relationships in the internet backbone

Abstract

Several researchers during the last decade have encountered the problem of how to infer business relationships between autonomous systems ASes of the internet. Since the internet has a decentralised structure and public data sources containing inter-domain routing information have not been created for topology inference, there are no accurate and comprehensive maps of the internet readily accessible. This challenge has inspired several approaches for inferring business relationships between ASes from BGP routing data. This article presents one implementation of the most recent and most promising approach for relationship inference on AS-level. The algorithm used has been improved in terms performance and quality of the sanitising process. Unlike recent projects, not a only snapshot of the topology of the internet has been inferred but a comprehensive map showing the internet over the last decade. The correctness of this implementation and the inferred dataset is examined by comparison with a business relationship graph and a validation dataset provided by related work.