Abstract

Over the last thirty years, the networking community has made considerable theoretical advances in the modeling and understanding of the behavior of Internet routing protocols. However, recent empirical studies reveal that operational practices for routing have outpaced the theory in at least two fundamental ways: First, routing designs in the real world, particularly those of large enterprise networks, have much more complex structures than the conventional 2-level BGP /OSPF hierarchy. Second, the connecting primitives of “administrative distance” and “route redistribution”, introduced by router vendors to allow merging multiple network domains that run independent routing protocol instances, are used to support critical design goals that cannot be fulfilled by routing protocols alone. In this talk, I present a new theory to reason about the safety of routing across multiple routing protocol instances. The theory directly applies to both link-state and vector routing protocols. Each routing protocol still makes independent routing decisions and may consider a combination of routing metrics, including bandwidth, delay, cost, and reliability. In addition, I describe a new set of connecting primitives derived from the theory that are not only provably safe but also more expressive than the current design.

This is a joint work with Franck Le and Hui Zhang of Carnegie Mellon University

Bio: Geoffrey Xie is visiting from the Department of Computer Sciences, U.S. Naval Postgraduate School, where he has been a full professor and associate department chair. He received a Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from the University of Texas at Austin, Texas in 1996. He was a visiting scientist in the School of Computer Science of Carnegie Mellon University from 2003 to 2004. His current research interests include clean slate design of IP control plane, static analysis of network configuration, Internet routing, systematic design of enterprise networks, and social networks.