On routing controls in ISP topologies: A structural perspective

Recent measurement studies on the Internet topology show that connectivity of nodes exhibits power-law attribute, but it is apparent that only the degree distribution does not determine the network structure, and especially true when we study the network-related control like routing control. In this paper, we evaluate the optimal routing and several routing methods on the ISP router level topologies where degree distributions follow power-law. We then examine how structural characteristics of topologies affect the network performance. The evaluation results show that the optimal routing method in a topology obtained by a modeling method considerably increases network throughput. However, the optimal routing method in ISP topologies cannot achieve high network throughput as observed in the modeling-based topology. Our results also show that our proposed routing method achieves almost the same network throughput to the optimal routing method in power-law networks, and more importantly, it exhibits the similar distribution of link utilization.