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:
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- Portable: BRITE is implemented
in Java and C++.
- User Friendly: BRITE provides
the user with a Graphical User Interface and a configuration file
to easily specify diverse topology generation parameters.
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