Traceroute is a critical tool in the Internet measurement toolbox, but its output can be misleading. One problem for traceroute analysis is that certain types of Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) tunnels hide routers from traceroute output. Worse still, there is no simple way to detect or reveal missing routers. Any analysis that expects comprehensive topology discovery—including identifying performance bottlenecks, analyzing traffic engineering approaches, and evaluating traffic sovereignty—needs to account for MPLS. In this paper, we replicate previous work by Vanaubel et al. [18, 21] to characterize and provide a snapshot of the current deployment of MPLS tunnels. We also release a sustainable and easily deployed tool for MPLS detection, called PyTNT. Using PyTNT, we find that the problematic types of MPLS tunnels remain prevalent, though we inferred a general decrease in MPLS usage across the Internet. We also inferred that public clouds accounted for 3 of the top 10 networks with the most routers observed to be in MPLS tunnels. Finally, we observed more MPLS routers in Europe than any in other continent, and more MPLS routers in the U.S. than any other country.

5G New Radio cellular networks are designed to provide high Quality of Service for application on wirelessly connected devices. However, changing conditions of the wireless last hop can degrade application performance, and the applications have no visibility into the 5G Radio Access Network (RAN). Most 5G network operators run closed networks, limiting the potential for co-design with the wider-area internet and user applications. This paper demonstrates NR-Scope, a passive, incrementally-deployable, and independently-deployable Standalone 5G network telemetry system that can passively measure fine-grained RAN capacity, latency, and retransmission information. Application servers can take advantage of the measurements to achieve better millisecond scale, application-level decisions on offered load and bit rate adaptation than end-to-end latency measurements or end-to-end packet losses currently permit. We demonstrate the performance of NR-Scope by decoding the downlink control information (DCI) for downlink and uplink traffic of a 5G Standalone base station in real-time.

Recent geopolitical events demonstrate that control of Internet infrastructure in a region is critical to economic activity and defense against armed conflict. This geopolitical importance necessitates novel empirical techniques to assess which countries remain susceptible to degraded or severed Internet connectivity because they rely heavily on networks based in other nation states. Currently, two preeminent BGP-based methods exist to identify influential or market-dominant networks on a global scale-network-level customer cone size and path hegemony-but these metrics fail to capture regional or national differences.

BGP communities allow operators to influence routing decisions made by other networks (action communities) and to annotate their network's routing information with metadata such as where each route was learned or the relationship the network has with their neighbor (information communities). BGP communities also help researchers understand complex Internet routing behaviors. However, there is no standard convention for how operators assign community values, and significant efforts to scalably infer community meanings have ignored this high-level classification. We discovered that doing so comes at significant cost in accuracy, of both inference and validation. To advance this narrow but powerful direction in Internet infrastructure research, we design and validate an algorithm to execute this first fundamental step: inferring whether a BGP community is action or information. We applied our method to 78,480 community values observed in public BGP data for May 2023. Validating our inferences (24,376 action and 54,104 informational communities) against available ground truth (6,259 communities) we find that our method classified 96.5% correctly. We found that the precision of a state-of-the-art location community inference method increased from 68.2% to 94.8% with our classifications. We publicly share our code, dictionaries, inferences, and datasets to enable the community to benefit from them.

Geolocating Internet routers is a long-standing and notoriously difficult challenge, and current solutions lack the accuracy and adaptability to yield reliable results. We revisit this problem, designing a solution capable of accurately and comprehensively extracting geographic information that network operators embed into router interface hostnames. We train our system using dictionaries that map geographic codes to known locations, and constrain inferences with delay measurements conducted from a distributed set of vantage points. While most operators use known geographic codes, some devise their own mnemonic codes for locations, which our system also extracts and interprets.

Using a toolbox of Internet cartography methods, and new ways of applying them, we have undertaken a comprehensive active measurement-driven study of the topology of U.S. regional access ISPs. We used state-of-the-art approaches in various combinations to accommodate the geographic scope, scale, and architectural richness of U.S. regional access ISPs. In addition to vantage points from research platforms, we used public WiFi hotspots and public transit of mobile devices to acquire the visibility needed to thoroughly map access networks across regions. We observed many different approaches to aggregation and redundancy, across links, nodes, buildings, and at different levels of the hierarchy. One result is substantial disparity in latency from some Edge COs to their backbone COs, with implications for end users of cloud services. Our methods and results can inform future analysis of critical infrastructure, including resilience to disasters, persistence of the digital divide, and challenges for the future of 5G and edge computing.

We present the design, implementation, evaluation, and validation of a system that learns regular expressions (regexes) to extract Autonomous System Numbers (ASNs) from hostnames associated with router interfaces. We train our system with ASNs inferred by Router-ToAsAssignment and bdrmapIT using topological constraints from traceroute paths, as well as ASNs recorded by operators in PeeringDB, to learn regexes for 206 different suffixes. Because these methods for inferring router ownership can infer the wrong ASN, we modify bdrmapIT to integrate this new capability to extract ASNs from hostnames. Evaluating against ground truth, our modification correctly distinguished stale from correct hostnames for 92.5% of hostnames with an ASN different from bdrmapIT's initial inference. This modification allowed bdrmapIT to increase the agreement between extracted and inferred ASNs for these routers in the January 2020 ITDK from 87.4% to 97.1% and reduce the error rate from 1/7.9 to 1/34.5. This work opens a broader horizon of opportunity for evidence-based router ownership inference.