Quantifying and Mitigating IGMP Filtering in Topology Discovery

Recent developments in router level topology discovery have suggested the introduction of IGMP probing in addition to standard techniques such as traceroute and alias resolution. With a single IGMP probe, one can obtain all multicast interfaces and links of a multicast router. If such a probing is a promising approach, we noticed that IGMP probes are subject to filtering, leading so to the fragmentation of the collected multicast graph into several disjoint connected components.

In this paper, we cope with the fragmentation issue. Our contributions are threefold: (i) we experimentally quantify the damages caused by IGMP filtering on collected topologies of large tier-1 ISPs; (ii) using traceroute data, we construct a hybrid graph and estimate how far each IGMP fragment is from each other; (iii) we provide and experimentally evaluate a recursive approach for reconnecting disjoint multicast components. The key idea of the third contribution is to recursively apply alias resolution to reassemble disjoint fragments and, thus, progressively extend the mapping of the targeted
ISP. Data presented in the paper, as well as reconstructed topologies, are freely available at http://svnet.u-strasbg.fr/merlin.