  The Autonomous System (AS)-level topology of the Internet that currently
comprises 40k ASs, is growing at a rate of about 10% per year. In these
conditions, Border Gateway Protocol (BGP), the inter-domain routing protocol of
the Internet starts to show its limits, among others in terms of the number of
routing table entries it can dynamically process and control. To overcome this
challenging situation, the design but also the evaluation of alternative
dynamic routing models and their comparison with BGP shall be performed by
means of simulation. For this purpose, DRMSim, a Dynamic Routing Model
Simulator, was developed that provides the means for large-scale simulations of
various routing models including BGP. By means of this discrete-event
simulator, execution of path-vector routing, e.g. BGP, and other compact
routing models have been successfully performed on network topologies
comprising more than ten thousand (abstract) nodes. However, to simulate
dynamic routing schemes like BGP, DRMSim needs enhancements to support current
Internet size (40k ASs) and even more by considering its evolution (up to 100k
ASs). This paper proposes a feasibility study of the extension of DRMSim so as
to support the Distributed Parallel Discrete Event paradigm. We first detail
the possible distribution models and their associated communication overhead.
Then, we analyze the communication overhead of such a distributed simulator by
executing BGP on a partitioned topology according to different scenarios.
Finally, we conclude on the feasibility of such a simulator by computing the
expected additional time required by a distributed simulation of BGP compared
to its sequential simulation.
