The Case for Seperating Routing from Routers
Nick Feamster (MIT)

Over the past decade, the complexity of the Internet's routing
infrastructure has increased dramatically. This complexity and the
problems it causes stem not just from various new demands made of the
routing infrastructure, but also from fundamental limitations in the
ability of today's distributed infrastructure to scalably cope with new
requirements.  The limitations in today's routing system arise in large
part from the fully distributed path-selection computation that the IP
routers in an autonomous system (AS) must perform. To overcome this
weakness, interdomain routing should be separated from today's IP routers,
which should simply forward packets (for the most part).  Instead, a
separate Routing Control Platform (RCP) should select routes on behalf of
the IP routers in each AS and exchange reachability information with other
domains. Our position is that an approach like RCP is a good way of coping
with complexity while being responsive to new demands and can lead to a
routing system that is substantially easier to manage than today. We
present a design overview of RCP based on three architectural
principles -- path computation based on a consistent view of
network state, controlled interactions between routing protocol layers,
and expressive specification of routing policies -- and discuss the
architectural strengths and weaknesses of our proposal.

Joint work with:
Hari Balakrishnan (MIT),  Jennifer Rexford (AT&T Labs--Research),  Aman
Shaikh (AT&T Labs--Research), and  Kobus van der Merwe (AT&T Labs--Research)

Paper link:

Bio:
Nick Feamster is a graduate student in the Networks and Mobile Systems
group at the MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence
Laboratory (formerly LCS) under the supervision of Professor Hari
Balakrishnan. He is interested in wide-area networking, network
measurement, and security. His current research focuses on modeling and
verification techniques for BGP and interdomain traffic engineering. He
is an NSF Graduate Research Fellow and the recipient of the Best Student
Paper awards at the USENIX Security Symposium in 2001 and 2002. Nick
received his S.B. and M.Eng. degrees in Electrical Engineering and
Computer Science from MIT in 2000 and 2001, respectively.