BRITE: an approach to universal topology generation

TLDR

Understanding the Internet’s large‑scale physical topology, its evolution, and component interactions is essential for engineering but remains difficult due to challenges in mapping, characterizing, and modeling its emergent behavior. The authors aim to create a universal topology generator that advances the state of the art by emphasizing representativeness, inclusiveness, and interoperability. The framework synthesizes multiple generation models to produce representative topologies with realistic hierarchical structure and node‑degree distributions, and offers interfaces to simulation and visualization tools such as ns, SSF, and Otter.

Abstract

Effective engineering of the Internet is predicated upon a detailed understanding of issues such as the large-scale structure of its underlying physical topology, the manner in which it evolves over time, and the way in which its constituent components contribute to its overall function. Unfortunately, developing a deep understanding of these issues has proven to be a challenging task, since it in turn involves solving difficult problems such as mapping the actual topology, characterizing it, and developing models that capture its emergent behavior. Consequently, even though there are a number of topology models, it is an open question as to how representative the generated topologies they generate are of the actual Internet. Our goal is to produce a topology generation framework which improves the state of the art and is based on the design principles of representativeness, inclusiveness, and interoperability. Representativeness leads to synthetic topologies that accurately reflect many aspects of the actual Internet topology (e.g. hierarchical structure, node degree distribution, etc.). Inclusiveness combines the strengths of as many generation models as possible in a single generation tool. Interoperability provides interfaces to widely-used simulation applications such as ns and SSF and visualization tools like otter. We call such a tool a universal topology generator.