Internet PoP level maps

Inferring the Internet Point of Presence (PoP) level maps is gaining interest due to its importance to many areas, e.g., for tracking and studying properties of the Internet. In this chapter we survey research towards the generation of PoP level maps. The chapter introduces different approaches to automatically classify IP addresses to PoPs and discusses their strengths and weaknesses. Special attention is devoted to the challenge of validating the generated PoP maps in the absence of ground truth. The chapter next describes general IP geolocation techniques, points out weaknesses in geolocation databases, as well as, in constraint-based approaches, and concentrates on PoPs geolocation techniques, discussing validation and lack of ground truth availability. The third part of the chapter describes how to generate maps with PoP-to-PoP connectivity and analyzes some of their properties. At the end of the chapter, some applications of PoP level maps, such as Internet distance maps, evolution models and homeland security are introduced and discussed.