For this week's reading I read the Pathlet Routing paper presented at ACM Sigcomm in 2009. Pathlet Routing improves on current techniques in routing by allowing for scalability, which is fast becoming an issue with Border Gateway Protocol (BGP), and also allows for multipath routing, which overcomes the poor reliability and suboptimal path quality often associated with BGP.
However, despite all its benefits, Pathlet Routing would have been destined to fail if it didn't have one key feature: it can emulate policies of BGP, source routing, and several recent multipath proposals (like NIRA, LISP, and MIRO). Although it is still too soon to see if Pathlet Routing is successful, ensuring that the new protocol works well with the existing protocols is a good step towards creating a successful routing protocol. Not only can Pathlet Routing emulate many different existing protocols, but it can mix policies so that it can emulate multiple different protocols to work together.
Although I could be cynical and say Pathlet Routing might never get a chance to shine, the fact that the Internet needs a scalable routing protocol actually means it could get a chance. We'll have to wait and see.
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