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Published 2004 | public
Book Section - Chapter

A First-Principles Approach to Understanding the Internet's Router-level Topology

Abstract

A detailed understanding of the many facets of the Internet's topological structure is critical for evaluating the performance of networking protocols, for assessing the effectiveness of proposed techniques to protect the network from nefarious intrusions and attacks, or for developing improved designs for resource provisioning. Previous studies of topology have focused on interpreting measurements or on phenomenological descriptions and evaluation of graph-theoretic properties of topology generators. We propose a complementary approach of combining a more subtle use of statistics and graph theory with a first-principles theory of router-level topology that reflects practical constraints and tradeoffs. While there is an inevitable tradeoff between model complexity and fidelity, a challenge is to distill from the seemingly endless list of potentially relevant technological and economic issues the features that are most essential to a solid understanding of the intrinsic fundamentals of network topology. We claim that very simple models that incorporate hard technological constraints on router and link bandwidth and connectivity, together with abstract models of user demand and network performance, can successfully address this challenge and further resolve much of the confusion and controversy that has surrounded topology generation and evaluation.

Additional Information

© 2004 ACM. Session 1: Network Geometry and Design. Reiko Tanaka assisted in the preparation of an early version of this work. We are indebted to Matt Roughan, Ramesh Govindan, and Steven Low for detailed discussions of router-level topologies and traffic modeling, Stanislav Shalunov for data on the Abilene network, and Heather Sherman for help with the CENIC backbone.

Additional details

Created:
August 19, 2023
Modified:
October 20, 2023