Acyclic Type-of-Relationship Problems on the Internet : An Experimental Analysis

Abstract

An experimental study of the feasibility and accuracy of the acyclicity approach introduced in [14] for the inference of business relationships among autonomous systems (ASes) is provided. We investigate the maximum acyclic type-of-relationship problem: on a given set of AS paths, find a maximum-cardinality subset which allows an acyclic and valley-free orientation. Inapproximability and NP-hardness results for this problem are presented and a heuristic is designed. The heuristic is experimentally compared to most of the state-of-the-art algorithms on a reliable data set. It turns out that the proposed heuristic produces the least number of misclassified customer-to-provider relationships among the tested algorithms. Moreover, it is flexible in handling pre-knowledge in the sense that already a small amount of correct relationships is enough to produce a high-quality relationship classification. Furthermore, the reliable data set is used to validate the acyclicity assumptions. The findings demonstrate that acyclicity notions should be an integral part of models of AS relationships.