Inferring router ownership based on the classification of intra- and inter-domain links

Research on router ownership inference is central to many Internet studies, such as network failure diagnosis, network boundary identification, network resilience assessment, and inter-domain congestion detection. The existing router ownership inference method bdrmapIT has relatively few constraints on routers at the end of traceroute paths, resulting in some inference errors. In this paper, a router ownership inference method based on the classification of intra- and inter-domain links is proposed. In this method, the differentiating Internet Protocol (IP) address vector distance feature, the autonomous system relationship feature of the IP link, and the fan-in and fan-out features are designed to support the discrimination of IP link types. The use of additional information derived from the link type enriches the basis for router ownership inference and improves the accuracy of the inference result. Experimental results show that the accuracy reaches 96.4% and 94.6% on the two verification sets, respectively, which is 3.2–11.2% better than the existing typical methods.