ATLAS: Accurate Topology Level-of-Detail Abstraction System

Abstract

The ability to extract topology information from the network is important for many applications and enables more informed resource selection. The challenge for topology exposure is to provide a compact representation that is sufficiently accurate and complies to topology hiding policies. This paper presents a topology abstraction system that can expose large-scale service provider network maps with an adjustable level-of-detail. Our system uses graph sparsification algorithms to reduce the complexity of routing topologies. Our numerical results reveal that the size of maps can be reduced by one order of magnitude or more while the result still enables reasonable traffic optimization inside applications. A proof-of-concept implementation gathers network management system data and exposes abstract maps through the Application-Layer Traffic Optimization (ALTO) protocol.