Large–Scale Simulation Models of BGP

Abstract

The complex nature of the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) is not amenable to analytical modeling, and thus simulation–based analysis methods are needed to understand its behavior. To this end, we investigate techniques that make large-scale BGP simulations feasible. The described techniques partially ameliorate the memory and execution time bottlenecks to yield large-scale BGP simulations. Our focus is cast on efficient sharing of BGP routing tables, execution time optimizations for simulation trials, and proper partitioning of parallel distributed BGP simulations. Moreover, we survey the requirements for realistic, Internet-like BGP simulations and develop a simulation toolset to expedite realistic configuration of a BGP simulator.