Deterministic, reduced-visibility inter-domain forwarding

Abstract

Inter-domain forwarding state is growing at a super-linear rate, rendering older routers obsolete and increasing the cost of replacement. A reduction of state will alleviate this problem. In this paper, we outline a new reduced-state inter-domain forwarding mechanism. We carefully drop portions of the advertised forwarding state using a utility measure for prefixes based on the length of the prefix and the path length to its origin. A deterministic forwarding algorithm uses the resulting partial view. The graph of connections between autonomous systems is shallow, offering many viable paths for data flows, a property we aim to use to achieve minimal detrimental effect on delay and AS path stretch.