An Internet routing emulation system: research and development

With the incessant growth of Internet and renewal of routing protocols, it becomes a demanding task to measure the running characteristics of routing protocol implementations (RPI) in a real large-scale network. In the paper, we analyze the hierarchical Internet topology, and propose a method to transform the GT-ITM model to BGP-OSPF oriented Internet topology. We design and implement Internet Routing Emulation System (IRES) as a test bed to inspect the above characteristics by combining Internet topology generation and RPI. Using IRES, we measure and analyze the OSPF RPI on a CISCO2600 router, and give the upper bound of the network scale it supports. The main contribution in this paper include: 1) we develop IRES by combining the Internet topology generation and RPI, 2) we propose a novel approach to inspect the running characteristics of RPI in a realistic large-scale network, and demonstrate this approach by experiments with IRES.