Evaluation of Internet topology generators by power law and distance indicators

The modeling of Internet topology is of vital importance to network researchers. Some network protocols, and particularly multicast ones, have performances that depend heavily on the network topology. That is why the topology model used for the simulation of those protocols must be as realistic as possible. In particular a protocol designed for the Internet should be tested upon Internet-like generated topologies. We provide a comparative study of six topology generators. The first five are among the latest available topology generators and the sixth is a generator that we have created. All of them try to generate topologies that model the power laws measured in the Internet topology. We check the accuracy of these generators by measuring some topology properties of their output graphs and by comparing them with indicators defined by the study of a few real Internet map topologies. We evaluate their strengths and weaknesses, and we provide a basic overall ranking.