Visualization of the topology generated by iGIS. The map features 3916 PoP locations from 42 real world networks from Internet Atlas. Paths between PoPs were generated by submarine cable connections from Telegeography.
Internet topology generators are useful for analyzing network structure and configurations, and form the basis for simulations that assess performance and robustness of new protocols and services. In this paper we describe iGIS, a system for generating, analyzing and visualizing geographically accurate PoP-level topologies in a scalable and flexible fashion. iGIS was specifically designed to harness and extend the capabilities of Geographic Information Systems (GIS - platforms for spatial data analysis) for Internet research. iGIS includes a database of the geographic locations of over 6.4K PoPs in 2648 unique cities and associated metadata that can be used in a variety of analyses. It also includes a toolkit for generating links between selected PoPs that approximate physical connectivity in live networks. We validate iGIS by comparing generated topologies to maps of live networks. We demonstrate the utility of iGIS by showing examples of the topologies/maps it can generate and analyses that utilize the multi-layer data structures of GIS.