Modeling on quicksand, dealing with the scarcity of ground truth in interdomain routing data

Researchers studying the inter domain routing system, its properties and new protocols, face many challenges in per- forming realistic evaluations and simulations. Modeling decisions with respect to AS-level topology, routing policies and traffic matrices are complicated by a scarcity of ground truth for each of these components. Moreover, scalability is- sues arise when attempting to simulate over large (although still incomplete) empirically-derived AS-level topologies. In this paper, we discuss our approach for analyzing the robustness of our results to incomplete empirical data. We do this by (1) developing fast simulation algorithms that enable us to (2) running multiple simulations with varied parameters that test the sensitivity of our research results.