Feasibility study on distributed simulations of BGP

TL;DR

This paper investigates the potential of extending the DRMSim routing simulator to support distributed parallel simulations of BGP, aiming to handle larger Internet topologies efficiently by analyzing communication overhead and feasibility.

Contribution

It presents a feasibility study on extending DRMSim for distributed BGP simulation, including distribution models, overhead analysis, and performance evaluation.

Findings

Distributed simulation of BGP is feasible with manageable overhead.

Partitioning strategies impact communication costs significantly.

Expected additional simulation time remains acceptable for large topologies.

Abstract

The Autonomous System (AS) topology of the Internet (up to 61k ASs) is growing at a rate of about 10% per year. The Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) starts to show its limits in terms of the number of routing table entries it can dynamically process and control. Due to the increasing routing information processing and storage, the same trend is observed for routing model simulators such as DRMSim specialized in large-scale simulations of routing models. Therefore, DRMSim needs enhancements to support the current size of the Internet topology and its evolution (up to 100k ASs). To this end, this paper proposes a feasibility study of the extension of DRMSim so as to support the Distributed Parallel Discrete Event paradigm. We first detail the possible distribution models and their associated communication overhead. Then, we analyze this overhead by executing BGP on a partitioned topology according to different scenarios. Finally, we conclude on the feasibility of such a simulator by computing the expected additional time required by a distributed simulation of BGP compared to its sequential simulation.