Measuring and modeling internet routing for realistic simulations

The Internet is composed of thousands of diverse networks that exchange routing information using the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP). BGP is one of the most critical protocols of the Internet, since it connects these diverse networks to enable communication between remote domains. Despite its critical nature, BGP suffers from a variety of serious problems, which have triggered substantial research on developing improved versions of BGP and new routing architectures. In this dissertation, we introduce necessary tools and data-mining techniques for analyzing the present routing architecture and for evaluating new routing protocols. We focus on the problem of performing realistic BGP simulations and we first develop a BGP simulator enabling detailed and large-scale BGP simulations. Then, we introduce techniques to collect vital Internet routing data, which are essential in conducting realistic BGP simulations. Finally, we introduce models of the collected data.