GeoTopo: A PoP-level Topology Generator for Evaluation of Future Internet Architectures

Network topology plays a critical role while designing and evaluating network protocols. Most existing topology generators are insufficient to reflect the real world network demands to a topology or to capture the Internet topology evolution such as the "flattening" Internet. They focused on the graph properties of a topology, thus, lacking of ability to model engineering features of the network. Some state-of-art topology generators that consider engineering factors fail to capture trends in both intra-AS and inter-AS connections, which are equally important for evaluating future network protocols. We have developed a topology generator GeoTopo, which is to our best knowledge the first scalable topology generator modeling engineering factors for both intra-AS and inter-AS topology generation. The engineering factors that GeoTopo considers include demographic and geographic features as well as business interests of ASes. We use GeoTopo to create and study three classes of topologies: the topology characterized mainly by graph-properties (Status Quo topology), the topology driven by peering at Internet Exchange Points (IXP topology) and the topology characterized by country backbones (CB topology). The SQ topology follows the degree-based model and serves as a baseline for capturing topology features. The IXP and CB topologies model two major directions of the Internet "flattening". The three classes of topologies enable us to analyze the impact of engineering factors on topology generation such as AS peering policies, IXP deployment and AS geo-settings. GeoTopo's ability to generate projected future Internet topologies make it a valuable tool for the design and evaluation of Future Internet Architectures that is currently under consideration in the research community. We use the evaluation of Global Name Resolution Service (GNRS), a key component shared by name-based network architectures, as an example application to demonstrate GeoTopo's capability to capture the mobility of network entities, the locality of the traffic, and the impact of the evolving network.