The MRINFO and MERLIN project


The aim of this project is to retrieve information on the Internet structure through the mrinfo tool.
This tool uses IGMP queries (see the latest dvmrp draft,  T. Pusateri,  draft-ietf-idmr-dvmrp-v3) to collect information on interfaces and neighbors of routers running an IPv4 multicast routing protocol (usually PIM).
By recursively calling mrinfo on neighbors of already known routers, one can map a subset of the mbone.
We call such a probing scheme: mrinfo-rec, and we use it since 2004.
Although mrinfo-rec provides only a marginal subset of the Internet (and in  fact a subset of the mbone due to the local and transit filtering on some routers) we can get precise informations on the neighborhood of a router (number and status of interfaces, number of neighboring routers through the same interface and so on).
During the 2004-2008 period, about 10 000 routers can be queried using this simple method.
Since this query is rather lightweight, we developped a script that collects data on the mbone everyday.  This way we can obtain information on the local evolution of routers (frequency of configuration changes for example).
However, mrinfo-rec is limited and suffers from several drawbacks. To overcome such limitations, we deploy a new centralized platform called MERLIN, MEasure the Router Level of the INternet. More specifically, we develop a new mrinfo client tool (MERLIN client - NGI 2011), and a server (MERLIN server) whose aim is to pilot a set of well distributed vantage points running the MERLIN client. This approach allows to extend the mrinfo multicast vision and we are now able to collect more than 50 000 routers. Moreover, we design a hybrid tool based on our platform which allows one to target specifics routing domains. This extension of the MERLIN platform relies on traceroute and ally in order to expand the vision of targeted multicast backbone.

Take a look to our mrinfo related publications:


  • Local and Dynamic Analysis of Internet Multicast Router Topology, Jean-Jacques Pansiot, Annals of telecommunications, Vol. 62, Num. 3-4, pp 408--425 - march 2007

  • Quantifying ASes Multiconnectivity using Multicast Information, Pascal Mérindol, Virginie Van Der Schrieck, Benoit Donnet, Olivier Bonaventure, and Jean-Jacques Pansiot, In Proc. ACM Internet Measurement Conference, ACM press, pp 370-376 - november 2009

  • Extracting Intra-Domain Topology from mrinfo Probing,  Jean-Jacques Pansiot, Pascal Mérindol, Benoit Donnet, and Olivier Bonaventure, In Proc. Passive and Active Measurement Conference (PAM), Zurich, Springer, LNCS, pp 81-90, Vol. 6032, A. Kishnamurthy and B. Plattner - april 2010

  • On the Impact of Layer-2 on Node Degree Distribution,  Pascal Mérindol, Benoit Donnet, Olivier Bonaventure, and Jean-Jacques Pansiot, In Proc. ACM/USENIX Internet Measurement Conference (IMC), November 2010.

  • MERLIN: MEasure the Router Level of the INternet ,  Pascal Mérindol, Benoit Donnet, Jean-Jacques Pansiot, Matthew Luckie, Young Huyn, In Proc. 7th Euro-nf Conference on Next Generation Internet (NGI), June 2011

    • IGMP probing offers several advantages: a native router level view, a L2 inferable vision (IMC2010) and it is no forwarding dependent (IMC2009). To better understand the characteristics of each map related to a given autonomous system (AS), we also develop a Router to AS mapping (R2AS - PAM2010): this technique allows us to mark the boundaries between ASes to investigate their intra- and inter- domain properties.

    Download our data sets:


  • The original raw data set from daily collected traces using mrinfo-rec can be found here.
    There is a directory YYYY-MM for each month since may 2004, with a sub directory YYYY-MM-DD for each day of the month. More details are given on this page.
  • Some graph theory analysis concerning the L2L3 bipartite structure of our data can be found in this zip. This analysis is based on the previous data set.


  • The last data set (it consist in refined graphs) obtained with our new MERLIN tool can be found here. Here, we target three specifics Tier-1 ASes: Global Crossing, Sprint and Level3.
  • The raw data used to obtain these final graphs is given here.


    • Last change on May 17th 2011