A Dirty-Slate Approach to Routing Scalability

The Internet routing table has been growing rapidly for the past few years. Further, as the IPv4 address space runs out, this growth will see substantial acceleration. Such routing table growth has several harmful implications, including increased convergence time, increased boot time, and costly equipment upgrades. These concerns were part of the reasons that led a recent Internet Architecture Board workshop to conclude that scaling the routing system is one of the most critical challenges of near-term Internet design. To this effect, there have been a number of proposals in the IETF and research community to address the problem through novel architectures.

This talk presents ViAggre (Virtual Aggregation), a “configuration-only” approach to shrinking the routing table on routers. ViAggre does not require any changes to router software and routing protocols and can be deployed independently and autonomously by any ISP. ViAggre is effectively a scalability technique that allows an ISP to partition the global routing table such that individual routers in the ISP’s network only maintain a fraction of the routing table. We find that ISPs today can use ViAggre to shrink the routing table on their routers by an order of magnitude. Beyond performance results, I will detail the deployment of ViAggre and show that ViAggre can also yield faster route convergence.

Speaker Details

Hitesh Ballani is a Ph.D. student in computer science at Cornell University. He received his B.Tech degree from IIT, Roorkee, India in 2003. His research interests are in networked systems with his work striking a balance between clean-slate and dirty-slate proposals. Past projects include research in network management, routing, security and network architecture.

Date:
Speakers:
Hitesh Ballani
Affiliation:
Cornell University