Orbis

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. In this paper, we propose techniques to generate annotated, Internet router graphs of different sizes based on existing observations of Internet characteristics. We find that our generated graphs match a variety of graph properties of observed topologies for a range of target graph sizes. While the best available data of Internet topology currently remains imperfect, the quality of our generated topologies will improve with the fidelity of available measurement techniques or next generation architectures that make Internet structure more transparent.