| The present Internet routing system faces two challenging
problems. First, unlike in the telephone system, Internet users cannot
choose their wide-area Internet service providers (ISPs) separately
from their local access providers. With the introduction of new
technologies such as broadband residential service and
fiber-to-the-home, the local ISP market is often a monopoly or a
duopoly. The lack of user choice is likely to reduce competition among
wide-area ISPs, limiting the incentives for wide-area ISPs to improve
quality of service, reduce price, and offer new services. Second, the
present routing system fails to scale effectively in the presence of
real-world requirements such as multi-homing for robust and redundant
Internet access. A multi-homed site increases the amount of routing
state maintained globally by the Internet routing system. As the
demand for multi-homing continues to rise, the amount of routing state
continues to grow.
This dissertation presents the design of a new Internet routing
architecture (NIRA) that simultaneously addresses these two
problems. NIRA gives a user the ability to choose the sequence of
Internet service providers his packets traverse. It also has better
scaling characteristics than today's routing system. The design of
NIRA is decomposed into four modular components: route discovery,
route availability discovery, route representation and packet
forwarding, and provider compensation. This dissertation describes
mechanisms to realize each of these components. It also makes clear
those places in the design where a globally agreed mechanism is
needed, and those places where alternative mechanisms can be designed
and deployed locally. In particular, this dissertation describes a
scalable route discovery mechanism. With this mechanism, a user only
needs to know a small region of the Internet in order to select a
route to reach a destination. In addition, a novel route
representation and packet forwarding scheme is designed such that a
source and a destination address can uniquely represent a sequence of
providers a packet traverses.
Network measurement, simulation, and analytic modeling are used in
combination to evaluate the design of NIRA. The evaluation suggests
that NIRA is scalable.
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