A first-principles approach to understanding the internet's router-level topology

Abstract

A detailed understanding of the many facets of the Internet's topological structure is critical for evaluating the performance of networking protocols, for assessing the effectiveness of proposed techniques to protect the network from nefarious intrusions and attacks, or for developing improved designs for resource provisioning. Previous studies of topology have focused on interpreting measurements or on phenomenological descriptions and evaluation of graph-theoretic properties of topology generators. We propose a complementary approach of combining a more subtle use of statistics and graph theory with a first-principles theory of router-level topology that reflects practical constraints and tradeoffs. While there is an inevitable tradeoff between model complexity and fidelity, a challenge is to distill from the seemingly endless list of potentially relevant technological and economic issues the features that are most essential to a solid understanding of the intrinsic fundamentals of network topology. We claim that very simple models that incorporate hard technological constraints on router and link bandwidth and connectivity, together with abstract models of user demand and network performance, can successfully address this challenge and further resolve much of the confusion and controversy that has surrounded topology generation and evaluation.

Sampling large Internet topologies for simulation purposes

“…Note that other generators and studies focus at the topology of the Internet at the router level, where each node represents an Internet router [30]. The topologies of interest are different in nature with the ones we examine, since they model the Internet at a different level of granularity, where the nodes (routers) have physical limitations in their ability to have large degrees.…”

NIT: A New Internet Topology Generator

“…The observation that a large number of topologies could be built from a degree distribution [26] turns the approach based on degrees insufficient to model the topology of the Internet. We believe that the association of degree distribution and metrics of distance may establish a new paradigm for the construction of synthetic topology generators, replacing the paradigm of generation based only on the node degree distribution.…”

Economics of quality of service

“…Furthermore, several authors have used ACE in order to assess the BE interconnection market and the development of the Internet topology (Chang et al 2006;Dhamdhere and Dovrolis 2009;Li et al 2004). However, this previous work provides only limited implications for the development of a QoS interconnection market.…”