Growth analysis of a large ISP

Abstract

We present a time-series analysis of Cogent's inter-continental network. The analysis is based on descriptions of Cogent's routers and their interfaces, collected each week for more than one year. These descriptions are collected from public reverse DNS records, which we cross-validate using iffinder, a full Internet scan, and limited ground truth data provided by Cogent. For example, our dataset, which we make available to the research community, shows that while the number of Cogent routers grew by approximately 11.3 each week, the average number of interfaces per router, and the effective diameter of the inferred network remained stable over the same period. Our collected dataset includes information about interface types, port identifications, router locations, peer and customer attachments, and more. Copyright is held by the owner/author(s).