Abstract

Network research often involves the evaluation of new application designs, system architectures, and protocol implementations. Due to the immense scale of the Internet, deploying an Internet-wide system for the purpose of experimental study is nearly impossible. Instead, researchers evaluate their designs using generated random network topologies. In this report, we present a topology generator that is based on Autonomous System (AS) connectivity in the Internet. We compare the networks generated by our generator with other types of random networks and show that it generates topologies that best approximate the actual Internet AS topology.

Citations