Selecting Representative IP Addresses for Internet Topology Studies

An Internet hitlist is a set of addresses that cover and can represent the internet as a whole. Hitlists have long been used in studies of internet topology, reachability, and performance, serving as the destinations of traceroute or performance probes. Most early topology studies used manually generated lists of prominent addresses, but evolution and growth of the internet make human maintenance untenable. Random selection scales to today's address space, but most random addresses fail to respond. In this paper, the authors present what they believe is the first automatic generation of hitlists informed censuses of internet addresses.