CAREER: Decoupling Policy from Mechanism in Internet Routing

University Of California-San Diego, La Jolla CA

Investigators

Abstract

This research is on separating forwarding policy from route discovery in the Internet, allowing users to select among possibly many inter-AS paths available to them and enabling ISPs to more effectively manage the end-to-end behavior of their traffic. The researcher is exploring the concept of the so-called network capability that binds together a path request, an accountable resource principal, and an authorizing agent. Network capabilities form the basis of Platypus, a loose source routing protocol that composes authorizations from multiple ISPs to construct alternative inter-AS routes that can be independently validated and accounted for on the fly. The proposed research has the potential to significantly improve the performance, reliability, and robustness of the Internet. Network capabilities remove many of the obstacles to deploying sophisticated routing policies in the Internet, enabling network operators to explicitly authorize third parties to affect the network's routing decisions in an accountable, secure, and efficient fashion. The major result of this project will be an implementation of Platypus and a demonstration of its effectiveness in expressing and arbitrating amongst competing ISP routing policies. In particular, this research will show that capabilities can express both existing ISP routing policies and additional, more complex policies not supported by BGP. The Platypus implementation will be made freely available and deployed on the PlanetLab and Internet-2 test-beds.