Building increasingly precise and realistic network topologies is an important issue for the purpose of evaluating networking applications. Still, the generation of router-level topologies has not been widely covered. Though, the properties of the router-level topologies have a significant impact on simulation results. For instance, the evaluation of applications such as Voice/Video over IP, P2P, routing protocols and traffic engineering methods critically depends on the properties captured by the topology model.

We believe that today’s network topologies are the fruits of a careful design taking into account practical constraints. We argue that it is possible to generate realistic network topologies by reproducing and automating the work of a human network designer. Due to the computational complexity of network design, heuristics are often used to build networks. This research track focuses on the evaluation of existing network topologies and the design of new algorithms for generating more realistic network topologies.