Bounding the Bias of Tree-Like Sampling in IP Topologies

It is widely believed that the Internet's AS-graph degree distribution obeys a power-law form. Most of the evidence showing the power-law distribution is based on BGP data. However, it was recently argued that since BGP collects data in a tree-like fashion, it only produces a sample of the degree distribution, and this sample may be biased. This argument was backed by simulation data and mathematical analysis, which demonstrated that under certain conditions a tree sampling procedure can produce an artificail power-law in the degree distribution. Thus, although the observed degree distribution of the AS-graph follows a power-law, this phenomenon may be an artifact of the sampling process. In this work we provide some evidence to the contrary. We show, by analysis and simulation, that when the underlying graph degree distribution obeys a power-law with an exponent larger than 2, a tree-like sampling process produces a negligible bias in the sampled degree distribution. Furthermore, recent data collected from the DIMES project, which is not based on BGP sampling, indicates that the underlying AS-graph indeed obeys a power-law degree distribution with an exponent larger than 2. By combining this empirical data with our analysis, we conclude that the bias in the degree distribution calculated from BGP data is negligible.Comment: 12 pages, 1 figur

Throughput Optimal On-Line Algorithms for Advanced Resource Reservation in Ultra High-Speed Networks

Advanced channel reservation is emerging as an important feature of ultra high-speed networks requiring the transfer of large files. Applications include scientific data transfers and database backup. In this paper, we present two new, on-line algorithms for advanced reservation, called BatchAll and BatchLim, that are guaranteed to achieve optimal throughput performance, based on multi-commodity flow arguments. Both algorithms are shown to have polynomial-time complexity and provable bounds on the maximum delay for 1+epsilon bandwidth augmented networks. The BatchLim algorithm returns the completion time of a connection immediately as a request is placed, but at the expense of a slightly looser competitive ratio than that of BatchAll. We also present a simple approach that limits the number of parallel paths used by the algorithms while provably bounding the maximum reduction factor in the transmission throughput. We show that, although the number of different paths can be exponentially large, the actual number of paths needed to approximate the flow is quite small and proportional to the number of edges in the network. Simulations for a number of topologies show that, in practice, 3 to 5 parallel paths are sufficient to achieve close to optimal performance. The performance of the competitive algorithms are also compared to a greedy benchmark, both through analysis and simulation.Comment: 9 pages, 8 figure