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Overview

BRITE is no longer supported by its developers, but questions can be asked on the brite-users mailing list.


Effective engineering of the Internet is predicated upon a detailed understanding of issues such as the large-scale structure of its underlying physical topology, the manner in which it evolves over time, and the way in which its constituent components contribute to its overall function. Unfortunately, developing a deep understanding of these issues has proven to be a challenging task, since it in turn involves solving difficult problems such as mapping the actual topology, characterizing it, and developing models that capture its emergent behavior. Consequently, even though there are a number of topology models, it is an open question as to how representative the topologies they generate are of the actual Internet. Our goal is to produce a topology generation framework which improves the state of the art and is based on design principles which include representativeness, inclusiveness, and interoperability. Representativeness leads to synthetic topologies that accurately reflect many aspects of the actual Internet topology (e.g. hierarchical structure, degree distribution, etc.). Inclusiveness combines the strengths of as many generation models as possible in a single generation tool. Interoperability provides interfaces to widely-used simulation applications such as ns, SSF and OmNet++ as well as visualization applications. We call such a tool a universal topology generator.

BRITE is an approach towards universal topology generation. We designed BRITE to be:

  1. Flexible: BRITE supports multiple generation models including models for flat AS, flat Router and hierarchical topologies. Models can be enhanced by assigning links attributes such as bandwidth and delay.
  2. Extensible: BRITE's object-oriented architecture provides researchers with the ability to add new models of generation and with the ability to import from and export to custom topology files.
  3. Interoperable: BRITE allows importing topologies from other topology generators and extending or combining them with other topologies. Currently importing topologies from GT-ITM (ALT format for both flat and transit-stub topologies), Inet, and NLANR AS (ASconnlist format) is implemented.  Support for CAIDA's Skitter IP level topologies and for router maps from the SCAN Project is also provided. Integration with CAIDA's visualization tool, Otter, allows visualization of generated topologies. Finally, export to simulation software ns, SSFNET, JavaSim and OmNet++ is implemented.
  4. Portable: BRITE is implemented in Java and C++.
  5. User Friendly: BRITE provides the user with a Graphical User Interface and a configuration file to easily specify diverse topology generation parameters.

A screenshot of BRITE's Graphical Interface

Sponsors

BRITE is in part funded by NSF grants CAREER ANI-0096045 and ANI-9986397.

 

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