We argue that designing overlay services to independently probe the Internet—with the goal of making informed application-specific routing decisions—is an untenable strategy. Instead, we propose a shared routing underlay that overlay services query. We posit that this underlay must adhere to two high-level principles. First, it must take cost (in terms of network probes) into account. Second, it must be layered so that specialized routing services can be built from a set of basic primitives. These principles lead to an underlay design where lower layers expose large-scale, coarse-grained static information already collected by the network, and upper layers perform more frequent probes over a narrow set of nodes. This paper proposes a set of primitive operations and three library routing services that can be built on top of them, and describes how such libraries could be useful to overlay services. 1.

Current intra-domain Traffic Engineering (TE) relies on offline methods, which use long term average traffic demands. It cannot react to realtime traffic changes caused by BGP reroutes, diurnal traffic variations, attacks, or flash crowds. Further, current TE deals with network failures by pre-computing alternative routings for a limited set of failures. It may fail to prevent congestion when unanticipated or combination failures occur, even though the network has enough capacity to handle the failure. This paper presents TeXCP, an online distributed TE protocol that balances load in realtime, responding to actual traffic demands and failures. TeXCP uses multiple paths to deliver demands from an ingress to an egress router, adaptively moving traffic from overutilized to under-utilized paths. These adaptations are carefully designed such that, though done independently by each edge router based on local information, they balance load in the whole network without oscillations. We model TeXCP, prove the stability of the model, and show that it is easy to implement. Our extensive simulations show that, for the same traffic demands, a network using TeXCP supports the same utilization and failure resilience as a network that uses traditional offline TE, but with half or third the capacity.

Internet end users and ISPs alike have little control over how packets are routed outside of their own AS, restricting their ability to achieve levels of performance, reliability, and utility that might otherwise be attained. While researchers have proposed a number of source-routing techniques to combat this limitation, there has thus far been no way for independent ASes to ensure that such traffic does not circumvent local traffic policies, nor to accurately determine the correct party to charge for forwarding the traffic. We present Platypus, an authenticated source routing system built around the concept of network capabilities. Network capabilities allow for accountable, fine-grained path selection by cryptographically attesting to policy compliance at each hop along a source route. Capabilities can be composed to construct routes through multiple ASes and can be delegated to third parties. Platypus caters to the needs of both end users and ISPs: users gain the ability to pool their resources and select routes other than the default, while ISPs maintain control over where, when, and whose packets traverse their networks. We describe how Platypus can be used to address several well-known issues in wide-area routing at both the edge and the core, and evaluate its performance, security, and interactions with existing protocols. Our results show that incremental deployment of Platypus can achieve immediate gains.

Abstract – We explore negotiation as the basis for cooperation between competing entities, for the specific case of routing between two neighboring ISPs. Interdomain routing is often driven by self-interest and based on a limited view of the internetwork, which hurts the stability and efficiency of routing. We present a negotiation framework in which adjacent ISPs share information using coarse preferences and jointly decide the paths for the traffic flows they exchange. Our framework enables pairs of ISPs to agree on routing paths based on their specific relationship, even if they have different optimization criteria. We use simulation with over sixty measured ISP topologies to evaluate our framework. We find that the quality of negotiated routing is close to that of globally optimal routing that uses complete, detailed information about both ISPs. We also find that ISPs have incentive to negotiate because both of them benefit compared to routing independently based on local information. 1

ISPs manage performance of their networks in the presence of failures or congestion by employing common traffic engineering techniques such as link weight settings, load balancing and routing policies. Overlay networks attempt to take control over routing in the hope that they might achieve better performance for such failures or high load episodes. In this paper, we examine some of the interaction dynamics between the two layers of control from an ISP’s view. With the help of simple examples, we illustrate how an uncoordinated effort of the two layers to recover from failures may cause performance degradation for both overlay and non-overlay traffic. We also show how current traffic engineering techniques are inadequate to deal with emerging overlay network services. 1.

A moderate amount of recent work has been dedicated to using overlay network to support value-added network service, such as overlay multicast, OverQoS, etc. As it does not require the underlying network support, a lot of new services can be easily deployed across Internet using overlay technique . Overlay service network is a generic service framework which is designed to provide a variety of services to overlay service customers.

In today’s Internet, users can choose their local Internet service providers (ISPs), but once their packets have entered the network, they have little control over the overall routes their packets take. Giving a user the ability to choose between provider-level routes has the potential of fostering ISP competition to offer enhanced service and improving end-to-end performance and reliability. This paper presents the design and evaluation of a new Internet routing architecture (NIRA) that gives a user the ability to choose the sequence of providers his packets take. NIRA addresses a broad range of issues, including practical provider compensation, scalable route discovery, efficient route representation, fast route fail-over, and security. NIRA supports user choice without running a global link-state routing protocol. It breaks an end-to-end route into a sender part and a receiver part and uses address assignment to represent each part. A user can specify a route with only a source and a destination address, and switch routes by switching addresses. We evaluate NIRA using a combination of network measurement, simulation, and analysis. Our evaluation shows that NIRA supports user choice with low overhead.

We present path splicing, a new routing primitive that allows network paths to be constructed by combining multiple routing trees (“slices”) to each destination over a single network topology. Path splicing allows traffic to switch trees at any hop en route to the destination. End systems can change the path on which traffic is forwarded by changing a small number of additional bits in the packet header. We evaluate path splicing for intradomain routing using slices generated from perturbed link weights and find that splicing achieves reliability that approaches the best possible using a small number of slices, for only a small increase in latency and no adverse effects on traffic in the network. In the case of interdomain routing, where splicing derives multiple trees from edges in alternate backup routes, path splicing achieves near-optimal reliability and can provide significant benefits even when only a fraction of ASes deploy it. We also describe several other applications of path splicing, as well as various possible deployment paths.

Abstract — In this paper, we study the interaction between

Abstract — In this paper, we study the interaction between