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. More scalable routing protocols 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 interdomain 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 project aims to first, build the DRMSim simulator which addresses the specific problem of
large-scale simulations of routing protocols on large networks. Then the second goal is to use DRMSim for investigating new interdomain routing
schemes on internet like topologies.
Until recently, the NS simulator, widely used in the networking community, did not comprise any BGP routing model. The recently introduced BGP++ module solves this limitation and allows NS users to perform inter-domain routing protocol simulations. BGP++ chooses to port an existing BGP daemon from Zebra to NS. This allows BGP++ to support most of Zebra daemon capabilities. Thus, it is now possible to use this daemon to build realistic inter-domain routing scenarios but not on large-scale networks. SSFNet, another discrete event simulator, took a different approach than BGP++. All the simulators previously cited here above share many properties in common. As DRMSim, they all rely on discrete event simulation. They are faster than real implementations and they support other protocols such as TCP, which is appropriate for simulating protocol dynamics. However, they are too detailed for BGP simulations (microscopic-level simulation): state machines of protocols are fully modeled. As a consequence, they need so much resources to simulate the behavior of the protocol that they are limited to networks of usually of few hundred nodes: large-scale simulations are out of reach. This is partly what motivates us to build a network simulator tailored to effective routing: only the necessary components for simulating routing protocols over large-scale topologies are modeled.
The DCR project is now closed. See Euler Fire Project for the investigation of a new routing scheme suitable for the future Internet and its evolution.