Network Sensitivity to Intradomain Routing Changes
Résumé
The Internet's routing architecture was designed to have a
clean separation between the intradomain and interdomain routing
protocols. However, the appropriate "division of labor" between these two
tiers becomes unclear when an Autonomous System (AS) has interdomain
routes to a destination through multiple border routers -- a situation
that is extremely common today because neighboring domains often connect
in several locations. Unfortunately, this evolution in Internet structure
has made it increasingly susceptible to unforeseen interactions between the
two routing protocols. We believe that the current mechanism of
early-exit or hot-potato routing---where each router
in an AS directs traffic to the "closest" border router based on
the intradomain distances--is convoluted, restrictive, and sometimes
quite disruptive.
This thesis improves the robustness of IP networks by revisiting the
interaction between intradomain and interdomain routing protocols. First,
it analyzes the influence of intradomain routing changes on BGP routing
(the interdomain routing in the Internet today). We found that some
intradomain routing changes trigger a significant number of BGP updates.
In fact, these BGP routing changes are responsible for the largest traffic
variations. Applications such as voice over IP, streaming, and gaming are
particularly sensitive to these instabilities.
As a result, the development of guidelines and tools for the design
and configuration of networks that minimize the impact on BGP are
important tasks for achieving network robustness. We address these
challenges using an analytic model of routing interaction that
incorporates metrics to evaluate network sensitivity to intradomain
changes. Our model identifies vulnerabilities in the network and can
be used by network administrators to engineer more robust networks.
Finally, we propose a simple change to router's BGP decision logic to
implement a flexible mechanism for selecting egress points for
traffic. This mechanism allows network administrators to
satisfy diverse goals, such as traffic engineering and robustness to
equipment failures. We present two example optimization problems that
use integer-programming and multicommodity-flow techniques,
respectively, to tune our mechanism to satisfy network-wide
objectives. Experiments with traffic, topology, and routing data from
two backbone networks demonstrate that our solution is both simple
(for the routers) and expressive (for the network administrators).
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