Describing and Simulating Internet Routes

TL;DR

This paper analyzes internet routes as graph structures, introduces statistical descriptions, and proposes methods to generate artificial routes for simulation, based on extensive route trace data.

Contribution

It provides a detailed statistical characterization of internet routes and introduces new methods for generating realistic artificial routes for simulation.

Findings

Statistical properties of internet routes are characterized.

New methods for generating artificial routes are proposed.

Evaluation shows the methods produce realistic route simulations.

Abstract

This paper introduces relevant statistics for the description of routes in the internet, seen as a graph at the interface level. Based on the observed properties, we propose and evaluate methods for generating artificial routes suitable for simulation purposes. The work in this paper is based upon a study of over seven million route traces produced by CAIDA's skitter infrastructure.