The case for separating routing from routers

By N. Feamster, Hari Balakrishnan, Jennifer Rexford, A. Shaikh, J. van der Merwe. FDNA '04, 2004

354 citations recorded by the source corpus.

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.

Subfields: Computer Networks and Communications, Hardware and Architecture

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b6c4184fc8c5f837e2b607326af25a552dde0c80

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Citations in the corpus

Satellite Communications in the New Space Era: A Survey and Future Challenges (2020, background): “computer networks can go back to more than 2 decades [252], for example, some works studied the introduction of programmability of some network functions [253], [254], the separation of the control and user plane [255], [256], or the centralization of management-control functions [257], [258],”
Software Defined Networking Architecture, Security and Energy Efficiency: A Survey (2017, background): “The development of SDN has begun in early 1990’s with the ideas obtained from various supporting technologies [30]–[33].”
A clean slate 4D approach to network control and management (2005, methodology): “RCP assumes routers are already correctly con.gured with signi.cant amounts of state, such as IP addresses and an Interior Gateway Protocol (IGP).”
Traffic engineering in software defined networks (2013, methodology): “Separating interdomain routing from individual routers and using a logically centralized Routing Control System was proposed in [2], [4] as a means to make routing systems more manageable, less complex and be accommodative of new service needs.”
The Road to SDN (2013, methodology): “Rather than waiting for new, open APIs to emerge, the RCP 12,26 used an existing standard control-plane protocol (the Border Gateway Protocol) to install forwarding table entries in legacy routers, allowing immediate deployment.”
Design and implementation of a routing control platform (2005, methodology): “For an overview of architecture and standards activities on separating routing from routers, see the related work discussions in [1, 2].”