Title: Graph-based analysis of cloud connectivity at the internet protocol level

Authors: Sebastian Dombrowski; Tatiana Ermakova; Benjamin Fabian

Addresses: Chair of Information Systems, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Spandauer Str. 1, 10178 Berlin, Germany ' University of Potsdam, August-Bebel-Str. 89, 14482 Potsdam, Germany ' Chair of Business Intelligence and Data Science, Hochschule für Telekommunikation Leipzig (HfTL), Gustav-Freytag-Str. 43-45, 04277 Leipzig, Germany

Abstract: Internet connectivity of cloud services is of exceptional importance for both their providers and consumers. This article demonstrates the outlines of a method for measuring cloud-service connectivity at the internet protocol level from a client's perspective. For this, we actively collect connectivity data via traceroute measurements from PlanetLab to several major cloud services. Furthermore, we construct graph models from the collected data, and analyse the connectivity of the services based on important graph-based measures. Then, random and targeted node removal attacks are simulated, and the corresponding vulnerability of cloud services is evaluated. Our results indicate that cloud service hosts are, on average, much better connected than average hosts. However, when interconnecting nodes are removed in a targeted manner, cloud connectivity is dramatically reduced.

Keywords: cloud computing; connectivity; availability; reliability; internet topology; graph analysis; complex networks.

DOI: 10.1504/IJCNDS.2019.100644

International Journal of Communication Networks and Distributed Systems, 2019 Vol.23 No.1, pp.117 - 142

Received: 24 Jul 2017
Accepted: 07 Mar 2018

Published online: 06 Jul 2019 *

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