Inter-Domain Routing with Extensible Criteria

Abstract: With the rapid evolution and diversification of Internet applications, their communication-quality criteria are continuously evolving. To globally optimize communication quality, the Internet's control plane thus needs to optimize inter-domain paths on diverse criteria, and should provide flexibility for adding new criteria or modifying existing ones. However, existing inter-domain routing protocols and proposals satisfy these requirements at best to a limited degree. We propose IREC, an inter-domain routing architecture that enables multi-criteria path optimization with extensible criteria through parallel execution and real-time addition of independent routing algorithms, together with the possibility for end domains to express their desired criteria to the control plane. We show IREC's viability by implementing it on a global testbed, and use simulations on a realistic Internet topology to demonstrate IREC's potential for path optimization in real-world deployments.