Simulating Routing Schemes on Large-Scale Topologies

The expansion of the Internet routing system results in a number of research challenges, in particular, the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) starts to show its limits a.o. in terms of the number of routing table entries it can dynamically process and control. Dynamic routing protocols showing better scaling properties are thus under investigation. However, because deploying under-development routing protocols on the Internet is not practicable at a large-scale (due to the size of the Internet topology), simulation is an unavoidable step to validate the properties of a newly proposed routing scheme. Unfortunately, the simulation of inter- domain routing protocols over large networks (order of tens of thousands of nodes) poses real challenges due to the limited memory and computational power that computers impose. This paper presents the Dynamic Routing Model simulator (DRMsim) which addresses the specific problem of large-scale simulations of (inter-domain) routing models on large networks. The motivation for developing a new simulator lies in the limitation of existing simulation tools in terms of the number of nodes they can handle and in the models they propose.