Abstract

Prior measurement studies of the Internet have explored traffic and topology, but have largely ignored edge hosts. While the number of Internet hosts is very large, and many are hidden behind firewalls or in private address space, there is much to be learned from examining the population of visible hosts, those with public unicast addresses that respond to messages. In this paper we introduce two new approaches to explore the visible Internet. Applying statistical population sampling, we use censuses to walk the entire Internet address space, and surveys to probe frequently a fraction of that space. We then use these tools to evaluate address usage, where we find that only 3.6% of allocated addresses are actually occupied by visible hosts, and that occupancy is unevenly distributed, with a quarter of responsive /24 address blocks (subnets) less than 5% full, and only 9% of blocks more than half full. We show about …

Date

2008

Authors

John Heidemann, Yuri Pradkin, Ramesh Govindan, Christos Papadopoulos, Genevieve Bartlett, Joseph Bannister

Book

Proceedings of the 8th ACM SIGCOMM conference on Internet measurement

Pages

169-182