Unveiling the MPLS Structure on Internet Topology

Recently, researches have been conducted to discover and assess the usage of MPLS tunnels. Indeed, recent developments in the ICMP protocol make certain categories of MPLS tunnels transparent to traceroute probing. Additional
techniques have been proposed to reveal the presence of MPLS tunnels when they do not explicitly appear in traceroute. It has been shown that MPLS is a very well deployed technology whose usage (i.e., Traffic Engineering, load balancing, etc.) varies in time and according to ASes. However, the MPLS structure on the Internet architecture has not been studied yet. In this paper, we follow this path by providing two contributions to the state of the art: (i) we evaluate the biases involved on MPLS tunnel detection when they are not directly revealed through traceroute. (ii), we provide some
properties and architectural details related with MPLS deployment on router topology based on a k-core decomposition.