John Heidemann / Papers / Understanding Block-level Address Usage in the Visible Internet

Understanding Block-level Address Usage in the Visible Internet
Xue Cai and John Heidemann

Citation

Xue Cai and John Heidemann. Understanding Block-level Address Usage in the Visible Internet. Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM Conference (New Delhi, India, Aug. 2010), 99–110. [DOI] [PDF] [alt PDF]

Abstract

Although the Internet is widely used today, we have little information about the edge of the network. Decentralized management, firewalls, and sensitivity to probing prevent easy answers and make measurement difficult. Building on frequent ICMP probing of 1% of the Internet address space, we develop clustering and analysis methods to estimate how Internet addresses are used. We show that adjacent addresses often have similar characteristics and are used for similar purposes (61% of addresses we probe are consistent blocks of 64 neighbors or more). We then apply this block-level clustering to provide data to explore several open questions in how networks are managed. First, we provide information about how effectively network address blocks appear to be used, finding that a significant number of blocks are only lightly used (most addresses in about one-fifth of /24 blocks are in use less than 10% of the time), an important issue as the IPv4 address space nears full allocation. Second, we provide new measurements about dynamically managed address space, showing nearly 40% of /24 blocks appear to be dynamically allocated, and dynamic addressing is most widely used in countries more recent to the Internet (more than 80% in China, while less than 30% in the U.S.). Third, we distinguish blocks with low-bitrate last-hops and show that such blocks are often underutilized.

Bibtex Citation

@inproceedings{Cai10a,
  author = {Cai, Xue and Heidemann, John},
  title = {Understanding Block-level Address Usage
           in the Visible {Internet}},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the  ACM SIGCOMM Conference },
  pages = {99--110},
  year = {2010},
  sortdate = {2010-08-01},
  project = {ant, amite, madcat},
  jsubject = {topology_modeling},
  address = {New Delhi, India},
  month = aug,
  publisher = {ACM},
  jlocation = {johnh: pafile},
  keywords = {internet address scans, block classification},
  copyrightholder = {ACM},
  copyrightterms = {
  Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work
  for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that
  copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage
  and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first
  page. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers or to
  redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a
  fee.
  },
  doi = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/1851182.1851196},
  url = {https://ant.isi.edu/%7ejohnh/PAPERS/Cai10a.html},
  pdfurl = {https://ant.isi.edu/%7ejohnh/PAPERS/Cai10a.pdf}
}

Copyright

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee.
Copyright © by John Heidemann