Outfitting an Inter-AS Topology to a Network Emulation TestBed for Realistic Performance Tests of DDoS Countermeasures

One of the significant requirements for testing a software implementation of an inter-AS DDoS countermeasure is to measure the performance of the implementation in a large scale topology with typical DDoS tools and traffic. Ideally, an emulated inter-AS topology with same scale of the real Internet will provide similar characteristics of the real Internet if the same number of physical servers or facilities are used. However, the number of available physical nodes in a network emulation testbed are limited to tens or hundreds of physical servers. Boosting the number of nodes by virtual machines is not suitable to measure actual software performance. We take a filtering approach in order to pick up a subgraph from the whole inter-AS topology of the real Internet to fit the facilities of a network emulation testbed. Considering required characteristics for realistic evaluation results, we propose four filtering techniques. In this paper, we try to evaluate and discuss the pros and cons of our filtering approaches and the appropriateness of the emulated inter-AS topologies created by our filtering methods.