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Researchers involved in designing network services and protocols rely on results from simulation and emulation environments to understand their application performance and scalability. To better understand the behavior of these applications and predict their performance when deployed on the actual Internet, the generated topologies must closely match real network characteristics, not just in terms of graph structure (node interconnectivity) but also with respect to various node and link annotations. Relevant annotations include link latencies, AS membership and whether a router is a peering or internal router. Finally, it should be possible to rescale a given topology to a variety of sizes while still maintaining its essential characteristics.
Mahadevan et al. (Mon,) studied this question.