The goal of this work is to create small and realistic topologies for simulation purposes. Given a real graph and a desired size, we reduce it iteratively in many small steps until it reaches the desired size. Second, we propose six reduction methods with which we reduce the graph at each step. The performance of these reduction algorithms is studied from various aspects on more than 100 topology instances from November 1997 to November 1999. Our experiments show that the reduction algorithms can generate small size graphs that maintain a number of properties of real graphs. On a series of experiments, our reduction methods exhibit consistent and predictable behavior for reduction up to 70% of the original graph.