Network Topology Discovery Algorithm And Implementation

In large and constantly evolving networks, it is difficult to determine how the network is actually laid out. Yet Knowledge of the up-to-date topology of an TCP/IP network is crucial to a number of critical network management tasks.Based on the analysis of the existing automatic topology discovery techniques,this paper presents a new topology discovery algorithm for heterogeneous TCP/IP networks using standard SNMP MIBs. Our algorithm makes use of the topology configuration information in routers, switches and hosts under the situation that do not generate traffic in the network in advance, to determine the interconnection between directly connected peers in a network, to produce the IP-level and link-level topology map. We have tested our approach in our internal network and we verified the result, it has accurately etermined the topology of several different networks using a variety of hardware and network configurations.A new visualization method, which applies to the display of the topology based on hierarchical structure, was proposed. It visualized the topology based on hierarchical structure with the major devices being separated from the minor devices in the different hierarchy. The major devices were hierarchically displayed on screen from top to bottom. The basic concept and important techniques in implementing the method were presented.