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.
Showing posts with label routing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label routing. Show all posts
Sunday, October 31, 2010
Thursday, October 14, 2010
The Problems with Routing (and Networking Research)
Today in class we read about a lot of the current problems with BGP routing. I was astounded to discover that a significant portion of BGP prefixes (around 25%) continuously flap and can take hours to converge to the correct route. Furthermore, the authors claim a 400 fold reduction in churn rate when using their protocol, the hybrid linkstate path-vector protocol or HLP, which seems to me reason enough to implement the routing protocol, yet we are still BGP.
This makes me feel a little discouraged when faced with the prospect of finding an area of networking research that could eventually be useful enough to be implemented in real networks. Maybe I am thinking on too large of a scale, I am sure there are many aspects of LANs, enterprise networks, etc., that could be modified and updated easily, but since I don't plan on being a system administrator, most of the research I do will be geared toward improving the Internet. However, since the Internet is so large, I understand the difficulties in implementing new architectures and protocols, but when helpful protocols, like HLP, that could make a significant impact on the Internet gets rejected, then there seems little hope for any research idea I could come up with.
On a more positive note though, I am sure that HLP had a significant impact on improvements in BGP in the last few years and there are other avenues of networking research that we have not discussed in class as of yet that could work better for prospective research ideas, such as wireless networks. So I am looking forward to covering that (as well as our sure to be interesting discussion on net neutrality next lesson).
This makes me feel a little discouraged when faced with the prospect of finding an area of networking research that could eventually be useful enough to be implemented in real networks. Maybe I am thinking on too large of a scale, I am sure there are many aspects of LANs, enterprise networks, etc., that could be modified and updated easily, but since I don't plan on being a system administrator, most of the research I do will be geared toward improving the Internet. However, since the Internet is so large, I understand the difficulties in implementing new architectures and protocols, but when helpful protocols, like HLP, that could make a significant impact on the Internet gets rejected, then there seems little hope for any research idea I could come up with.
On a more positive note though, I am sure that HLP had a significant impact on improvements in BGP in the last few years and there are other avenues of networking research that we have not discussed in class as of yet that could work better for prospective research ideas, such as wireless networks. So I am looking forward to covering that (as well as our sure to be interesting discussion on net neutrality next lesson).
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