Understanding Block-level Address Usage in the Visible Internet

Xue Cai and John Heidemann
USC/Information Sciences Institute

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.

Availability

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Reference

Cai10a

Xue Cai and John Heidemann. Understanding Block-level Address Usage in the Visible Internet. In Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM Conference , p. to appear. New Delhi, India, ACM. August, 2010. <http://www.isi.edu/~johnh/PAPERS/Cai10a.html>.

@inproceedings{Cai10a,
	author = "Xue Cai and John Heidemann",
	title = "Understanding Block-level Address Usage
         in the Visible {Internet}",
	booktitle = "Proceedings of the  {ACM} SIGCOMM Conference ",
	pages = "to appear",
	year = "2010",
	address = "New Delhi, India",
	month = "August",
	publisher = "{ACM}",
	keywords = "internet address scans, block classification",
	copyrightholder = "{ACM}",
	coyprightterms = "
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.
",
	url = "http://www.isi.edu/~johnh/PAPERS/Cai10a.html",
	pdfurl = "http://www.isi.edu/~johnh/PAPERS/Cai10a.pdf",
}

Copyright

This paper is copyright © 2010 by ACM. Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that new copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Abstracting with credit is permitted.

To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission of the authors.