12th IEEE International Symposium on Modeling, Analysis, and Simulation of Computer and Telecommunications Systems (MASCOTS'04)
Routing in an Internet-Scale Network Emulator
Volendam, The Netherlands
October 04-October 08
ISBN: 0-7695-2251-3
Jay Chen, University of California at San Diego
One of the primary challenges facing scalable network emulation and simulation is the overhead of storing network-wide routing tables or computing appropriate routes on a per-packet basis. We present an approach to routing table calculation and storage based on spanning tree construction that provides an order of magnitude reduction in routing table size for Internet-like topologies. In our approach, we maintain a variable number of spanning trees for a given topology and choose the path between two hosts in each tree, choosing the shortest. We also populate offline a negative cache of actual shortest paths for source-destination pairs — typically a few percent of the total — where the lookups result in sub-optimal routes. We have implemented our technique in a popular network emulator, ModelNet, and show that our enhanced version can emulate Internet topologies 10-100 times larger than previously possible.
Citation:
Jay Chen, Diwaker Gupta, Kashi V. Vishwanath, Alex C. Snoeren, Amin Vahdat, "Routing in an Internet-Scale Network Emulator," mascots, pp.275-283, 12th IEEE International Symposium on Modeling, Analysis, and Simulation of Computer and Telecommunications Systems (MASCOTS'04), 2004