OPCA: robust interdomain policy routing and traffic control

• Published in: 2003 IEEE Conference on Open Architectures and Network Programming pp. 55 - 64
• Main Authors: Agarwal, S., Chen-Nee Chuah, Katz, R.H.
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 2003
• Subjects: Communication system traffic control; Fault tolerance; IEEE news; Internet; IP networks; Joining processes; Robust control; Routing protocols; Stress; Traffic control
• ISBN: 0780377648; 9780780377646
• DOI: 10.1109/OPNARC.2003.1196373

An increasing number of ASes have been connecting to the Internet through the BGP inter-domain routing protocol. With increasing stress on the scale of this system and increasing reliance on Internet connectivity, more participants demand additional functionality from interdomain routing that BGP cannot handle. For example, we believe that the recent trend towards multihomed stub networks exhibits a likely intent to achieve fault tolerant and load balanced connectivity to the Internet. However, BGP today offers route fail-over times as long as 15 minutes, and very limited control over incoming traffic across multiple wide area paths. More research literature and news media are calling for stemming malicious or erroneous routing announcements. We propose a policy control architecture, OPCA, that runs as an overlay network on top of BGP. OPCA allows an AS to make route change requests at other, remote ASes to achieve faster route fail-over and provide capabilities to control traffic entering the local AS. The proposed architecture and protocol will co-exist and interact with the existing routing infrastructure and will allow for a scalable rollout of the protocol.