Policy-Aware Topologies for Efficient Inter-Domain Routing Evaluations

The Internet community has not reached a consensus on an appropriate topological model for evaluating the performance of inter-domain routing protocols. Using the current Internet topology is not realistic, since its size is prohibitively large for, say, a packet-level BGP simulation. Furthermore, routing policies, which play a critical role in inter-domain routing, are often ignored in many simulation studies. In this paper, we address this issue by designing an algorithm to generate small-scale, realistic, and policy-aware topologies. We propose HBR, a network sampling method, which produces topologies that preserve the fundamental properties of the Internet graph, including, in particular, its hierarchical structure. Our approach provides a long-term solution to the difficult problem of AS-level routing evaluations: it can be used to generate small realistic topologies in the future, starting from any newer or more complete Internet instance.