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Beyond Best Effort: Routing with Requirements

Authors:
Bradley Smith
Paul Tatarsky

Keywords: Routing; Quality-of-Service; Traffic Engineering; Routing Requirements.

Abstract:
Originally designed for the exchange of best effort traffic (email, web, etc.), the Internet had the modest requirements of best-effort service and global reachability. The resulting architecture provides robust and scalable networking, however it is insecure, does not support the performance and policy requirements of modern applications, and makes inefficient use of network resources. While mechanisms have been developed that attempt to address these limitations (firewalls, Policy-Routing, Traffic Engineering with Multi-Protocol Label Switching, Segment Routing, etc.), they are expensive (requiring additional devices and expensive expertise), complicated to configure, and fragile in the context of a changing network. We have developed a new routing architecture based on flow requirements that enhances the Internet to forward traffic based on the requirements of each network flow. We accomplish this by computing a best set of paths that provides the full range of performance and policy available in a network, and forwarding flows over the least congested of the subset of these paths that satisfies their requirements. The resulting architecture ensures traffic is forwarded over paths that provide the performance, security, and resource control required by applications, users, and network administrators for each flow, while optimizing use of network resources. We have developed a prototype and submitted it to an independent testing lab that has verified the functionality and quantified the increase in performance in their testbed network (6x capacity increase).

Pages: 5 to 12

Copyright: Copyright (c) IARIA, 2025

Publication date: March 9, 2025

Published in: conference

ISSN: 2308-443X

ISBN: 978-1-68558-234-0

Location: Lisbon, Portugal

Dates: from March 9, 2025 to March 13, 2025