ANT Internet Census Datasets

Data Sources

Our Internet Address Space maps use data from several sources. The primary source is the Internet Address Census and Surveys we’ve taken at USC since 2003.

Derivative Data

From censuses we derive IP Hitlists that suggest targets to probe for topology studies.

We also produce IPv4 History datasets that combine the 16 most recent censuses.

In addition, our browsable maps include views that include whois data from the regional internet registries in the “organization” plane, and IP geolocation data from Software77’s IPToCountry database.

About and Obtaining USC/ISI-generated Datasets

Our Publications About This Work

Technical documents describing this data:

[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] (missing reference)

  • Xun Fan and John Heidemann 2010. Selecting Representative IP Addresses for Internet Topology Studies. Proceedings of the ACM Internet Measurement Conference (Melbourne, Australia, Nov. 2010), 411–423. [DOI] [PDF] Details
  • Xue Cai and John Heidemann 2010. Understanding Block-level Address Usage in the Visible Internet. Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM Conference (New Delhi, India, Aug. 2010), 99–110. [DOI] [PDF] Details
  • John Heidemann, Yuri Pradkin, Ramesh Govindan, Christos Papadopoulos, Genevieve Bartlett and Joseph Bannister 2008. Census and Survey of the Visible Internet. Proceedings of the ACM Internet Measurement Conference (Vouliagmeni, Greece, Oct. 2008), 169–182. [PDF] Details
  • John Heidemann, Yuri Pradkin, Ramesh Govindan, Christos Papadopoulos, Genevieve Bartlett and Joseph Bannister 2008. Census and Survey of the Visible Internet (extended). Technical Report ISI-TR-2008-649b. USC/Information Sciences Institute. [PDF] Details
  • John Heidemann, Yuri Pradkin, Ramesh Govindan, Christos Papadopoulos and Joseph Bannister 2007. Exploring Visible Internet Hosts through Census and Survey. Technical Report ISI-TR-2007-640. USC/Information Sciences Institute. [PDF] [Dataset] Details

Other Groups Use of Censuses, Surveys, and Hitlists

Many external groups have used hitlists, censues, and surveys in their topology studies. Here are some of which we are aware:

[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] [10]

  • Yi-Ching Chiu, Brandon Schlinker, Abhishek Balaji Radhakrishnan, Ethan Katz-Bassett and Ramesh Govindan 2015. Are We One Hop Away from a Better Internet? Proceedings of the ACM Internet Measurement Conference (Tokyo, Japan, Oct. 2015), 523–529. [DOI] Details
  • Danilo Cicalese, Jordan Aug’e, Diana Joumblatt, Timur Friedman and Dario Rossi 2015. Characterizing IPv4 Anycast Adoption and Deployment. Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Emerging Networking Experiments and Technologies (Heidelberg, Germany, Dec. 2015). [DOI] Details
  • Italo Cunha, Pietro Marchetta, Matt Calder, Yi-Ching Chiu, Brandon Schlinker, Bruno V. A. Machado, Antonio Pescap‘e, Vasileios Giotsas, Harsha V. Madhyastha and Ethan Katz-Bassett 2016. Sibyl: A Practical Internet Route Oracle. Proceedings of the USENIX Symposium on Network Systems Design and Implementation (Santa Clara, CA, USA, Mar. 2016), 325–344. Details
  • Alberto Dainotti, kc claffy, Alistair King, Vasco Asturiano, Karyn Benson, Marina Fomenkov, Brad Huffaker, Young Hyun, Ken Keys, Ryan Koga, Alex Ma, Chiara Orsini and Josh Polterock 2017. IODA: Internet Outage Detection & Analysis. Talk at CAIDA Active Internet Measurement Workshop (AIMS). Details
  • Ioana Livadariu 2016. Studying the IPv4 Transfer Market: Reported Transfers. Details
  • Pietro Marchetta and Antonio Pescapé 2013. DRAGO: Detecting, Quantifying and Locating Hidden Routers in Traceroute IP Paths. Proceedings of the 16th IEEE Global Internet Symposium (Turin, Italy, Apr. 2013), to appear. Details
  • Pietro Marchetta, Valerio Persico, Antonio Pescapé and Ethan Katz-Bassett 2013. Don’t Trust Traceroute (Completely). Proceedings of the ACM CoNEXT Student Workshop (Santa Barbara, CA, USA, Dec. 2013), 5–8. [DOI] Details
  • Pietro Marchetta, Walter de Donato and Antonio Pescapé 2013. Detecting Third-party Addresses in Traceroute Traces with IP Timestamp Option. Proceedings of the Passive and Active Measurement Workshop (Hong Kong, China, Mar. 2013). Details
  • Pietro Marchetta, Walter de Donato, Valerio Persico and Antonio Pescap’e 2015. Experimenting with Alternative Path Tracing Solutions. Proceedings of the IEEE Symposium on Computers and Communications (Golden Bay, Larnaca, Cyprus, Jul. 2015). [DOI] Details
  • Pietro Marchetta, Antonio Montieri, Valerio Persico, Antonio Pescapé, Ítalo Cunha and Ethan Katz-Bassett 2016. How and How Much Traceroute Confuses Our Understanding of Network Paths. Proceedings of the International Symposium on Local and Metropolitan Area Networks (Rome, Italy, Jun. 2016). [DOI] Details

Obtaining Data

High resolution images of our address space maps are available upon request. Please contact John Heidemann for details.

Our censuses and surveys are available to researchers upon request from the authors or through IMPACT and via our dataset request page. A sample dataset is USC/LANDER internet_address_survey_it15w-20061108; and a complete list is here.

Details about the methodology are in USC/ISI technical report ISI-TR-2007-640 and at https://ant.isi.edu/address.

Credits and Support Information for Our Work

Support for this work is through

Conclusions of this work are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of sponsors.

Our visualizations of the Internet address space use the Hilbert layout inspired by by Randall Munroe in xkcd #195. Census visualization by John Heidemann. Census probing by Yuri Pradkin. Census methodology by John Heidemann, Yuri Pradkin, Ramesh Govindan, Christos Papadopoulos, Joseph Bannister.