This experiment uses information about interconnectivity of AUtonomous Systems based on BGP routing information, and constructs path length information based on the Autonomous Systems involved. E.g., in the path between AS numbers 5 and 8 would be <5, 10, 27, 12, 312, 8> the length would be 6.

The input file used is from http://moat.nlanr.net/AS as the "list of AS interconnection pairs" for the date "971229." It includes 3213 unique AS numbers and 6196 AS adjacencies. The created routing table created a little more than 10.3 million paths, and the output filke consumed almost 410 Magabytes.

a perl program asc.pl created the aspathlen output file from which the histograms were drawn: