Multicasting, the transmission of a packet to a group of hosts, is an important service for improving the efficiency and robustness of distributed systems and applications. Although multicast capability is available and widely used in local area networks, when those LANs are interconnected by store-and-forward routers, the multicast service is usually not offered across the resulting internetwork. To address this limitation, we specify extensions to two common internetwork routing algorithms-distance-vector routing and link-state routing-to support low-delay datagram multicasting beyond a single LAN. We also describe modifications to the single-spanning-tree routing algorithm commonly used by link-layer bridges, to reduce the costs of multicasting in large extended LANs. Finally, we discuss how the use of multicast scope control and hierarchical multicast routing allows the multicast service to scale up to large internetworks.

Landmark Routing is a set of algorithms for routing in communications networks of arbitrary size. Landmark Routing is based on a new type of hierarchy, the Landmark Hierarchy. The Landmark Hierarchy exhibits path lengths and routing table sizes similar to those found in the traditional area or cluster hierarchy. The Landmark Hierarchy, however, is easier to dynamically configure using a distributed algorithm. It can therefore be used as the basis for algorithms that dynamically configure the hierarchy on the fly, thus allowing for very large, dynamic networks. This paper describes the Landmark Hierarchy, analyzes it, and compares it with the area hierarchy. 1.

This paper presents the design of a new Internet routing architecture (NIRA). In today’s Internet, users can pick their own ISPs, but once the packets have entered the network, the users have no control over the overall routes their packets take. NIRA aims at providing end users the ability to choose the sequence of Internet service providers a packet traverses. User choice fosters competition, which imposes an economic discipline on the market, and fosters innovation and the introduction of new services. This paper explores various technical problems that would have to be solved to give users the ability to choose: how a user discovers routes and whether the dynamic conditions of the routes satisfy his requirements, how to efficiently represent routes, and how to properly compensate providers if a user chooses to use them. In particular, NIRA utilizes a hierarchical provider-rooted addressing scheme so that a common type of domainlevel route can be efficiently represented by a pair of addresses. In NIRA, each user keeps track of the topology information on domains that provide transit service for him. A source retrieves the topology information of the destination on demand and combines this information with his own to discover end-to-end routes. This route discovery process ensures that each user does not need to know the complete topology of the Internet.

Abstract — The impact of routing policy on Internet paths is poorly understood. In theory, policy can inflate shortest-router-hop paths. To our knowledge, the extent of this inflation has not been previously examined. Using a simplified model of routing policy in the Internet, we obtain approximate indications of the impact of policy routing on Internet paths. Our findings suggest that routing policy does impact the length of Internet paths significantly. For instance, in our model of routing policy, some 20 % of Internet paths are inflated by more than five router-level hops. Keywords—Routing, Routing Policy, Policy Routing, Internet Paths I.

This paper presents a family of memory-balanced routing schemes that use relatively short paths while storing relatively little routing information. The hierarchical schemes H k (for every integer k 1) guarantee a stretch factor of O(k 2 ) on the length of the routes and require storing at most O(kn 1 k log n log D) bits of routing information per vertex in an n-processor network with diameter D. The schemes are nameindependent and applicable to general networks with arbitrary edge weights. This improves on previous designs whose stretch bound was exponential in k. Key words: Communication networks, routing tables, communication-space trade-offs, graph covers. Dept. of Mathematics and Lab. for Computer Science, M.I.T., Cambridge, MA 02139; ARPANET: baruch@theory.lcs.mit.edu. Supported by Air Force Contract TNDGAFOSR-86-0078, ARO contract DAAL03-86-K-0171, NSF contract CCR8611442, DARPA contract N00014-89-J-1988, and a special grant from IBM. y Department of Applied Mathemati...

In this paper we address the problem of routing in a large wireless, mobile network such as found in the automated battle field or in extensive disaster recovery operations. Conventional routing does not scale well to network size. Likewise, conventional hierarchical routing cannot handle mobility efficiently. In this paper, we propose a novel soft state Wireless HIerarchical Routing protocoL (WHIRL). We distinguish between the "physical" routing hierarchy (dictated by geographical relationships between nodes) and "logical" hierarchy of subnets in which the members move as a group (e.g., company, brigade, battalion in the battlefield). WHIRL keeps track of logical subnet movements using Home Agent concepts akin to Mobile IP. A group mobility model is introduced and the performance of the WHIRL is evaluated through a detailed wireless simulation model.

In designing a routing scheme for a communication network it is desirable to use as short as possible paths for routing messages, while keeping the routing information stored in the processors' local memory as succinct as possible. The efficiency of a routing scheme is measured in terms of its stretch factor - the maximum ratio between the cost of a route computed by the scheme and that of a cheapest path connecting the same pair of vertices. This paper presents a family of adaptive routing schemes for general networks. The hierarchical schemes HS k (for every fixed k 1) guarantee a stretch factor of O(k 2 \Delta 3 k ) and require storing at most O \Gamma kn 2 k log n \Delta bits of routing information per vertex. The new important features, that make the schemes appropriate for adaptive use, are ffl applicability to networks with arbitrary edge costs; ffl name-independence, i.e., usage of original names; ffl a balanced distribution of the memory; ffl an efficient on-li...

This survey concerns the role of data structures for compactly storing and representing various types of information in a localized and distributed fashion. Traditional approaches to data representation are based on global data structures, which require access to the entire structure even if the sought information involves only a small and local set of entities. In contrast, localized data representation schemes are based on breaking the information into small local pieces, or labels, selected in a way that allows one to infer information regarding a small set of entities directly from their labels, without using any additional (global) information. The survey focuses on combinatorial and algorithmic techniques, and covers complexity results on various applications, including compact localized schemes for message routing in communication networks, and adjacency and distance labeling schemes.

This paper investigates the problem of routing flows with Quality-of-Service (QoS) requirements through one or more networks, when the information available for making such routing decisions is inaccurate. Inaccuracy in the information used in computing QoS routes, e.g., network state such as link and node metrics, arises naturally in a number of different environments that are reviewed in the paper. Our goal is to determine the impact of such inaccuracy on the ability of the path selection process to successfully identify paths with adequate available resources. In particular, we focus on devising algorithms capable of selecting path(s) that are most likely to successfully accommodate the desired QoS, in the presence of uncertain network state information. For the purpose of our analysis, we assume that this uncertainty is expressed through probabilistic models, and we briefly discuss sample cases that can give rise to such models. We establish that the impact of uncertainty is minima...

We present the source-tree adaptive routing (STAR) protocol and analyze its performance in wireless networks with broadcast radio links. Routers in STAR communicate to its neighbors their source routing trees either incrementally or in atomic updates. Source routing trees are specified by stating the link parameters of each link belonging to the paths used to reach every destination. Hence, a router disseminates link-state updates to its neighbors for only those links along paths used to reach destinations. Simulation results show that STAR is an order of magnitude more efficient than any topology-broadcast protocol, and four times more efficient than ALP, which was the most efficient table-driven routing protocol based on partial link-state information reported to date. The results also show that STAR is even more efficient than the Dynamic Source Routing (DSR) protocol, which has been shown to be one of the best performing on-demand routing protocols.