Knowledge of the up-to-date physical topology of an IP network is crucial to a number of critical network management tasks, including reactive and proactive resource management, event correlation, and root-cause analysis. Given the dynamic nature of today's IP networks, keeping track of topology information manually is a daunting (if not impossible) task. Thus, effective algorithms for automatically discovering physical network topology are necessary. Earlier work has typically concentrated on either discovering logical (i.e., layer-3) topology, which implies that the connectivity of all layer-2 elements (e.g., switches and bridges) is ignored, or proprietary solutions targeting specific product families. This paper presents novel algorithms for discovering physical topology in heterogeneous (i.e., multi-vendor) IP networks.
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