Topology generation based on network design heuristics

Bruno Quoitin

Building increasingly precise and realistic network topologies is an important issue for the purpose of evaluating networking applications. Still, the generation of router-level topologies has not been widely covered. We believe that today's network topologies are the fruits of a careful design taking into account practical constraints. We argue that it is possible to generate realistic network topologies by reproducing and automating the work of a human network designer. Due to the computational complexity of network design, heuristics are often used to build networks. The networking literature contains lots of network design methods which are currently seldom used by researchers. One reason is that few algorithms are implemented in publicly available tools.
We propose an open-source tool that can be used to generate network topologies based on network design methods. Our tool currently implements a variety of network design heuristics and allowd to play with a large spectra of parameters leading to different network designs.

Published in Proceedings of the CoNEXT conference, Toulouse, France, October 2005.

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