MNTG: A New Flexible Multilayer Network Topology Generator

The increasing use of both virtual and overlay networks have inflated the amount of stacked protocol layers in networking architectures. This added complexity calls for new types of protocols, i.e. multilayer forwarding and routing protocols, which can initially be designed by using simulations. Simulating such protocols, however, requires the input of appropriate network topologies. Most existing network topology generators only have the capability to produce flat topologies representing a given layer. To address this gap, a new multilayer network topology generator called MNTG is presented in this paper. Its flexible design provides for three modes from which to create multilayer network topologies. These are single topologies, multiple synthetic topologies or multiple real network maps. Given at most
$n$
nodes per layer and
$l$
layers, the compute cost is in the order of
$O(nl^{2})$
operations. Multilayer routing simulations carried out over various MNTG-generated topologies show that the impact of modeling such multilayer topologies can be significant on the simulation results.