MIFO: Multi-path Interdomain Forwarding

Today's interdomain routing is traffic agnostic when determining the single, best forwarding path. Naturally, as it does not adapt to congestion, the path chosen is not always optimal. In this paper, we focus on designing a multi-path interdomain forwarding (MIFO) mechanism, where AS border routers adaptively forward outbound traffic from a congested default path to an alternative path, without touching the interdomain routing protocols. Different from previous efforts which enable multi-path on control plane, MIFO achieves multi-path on data plane. The multiple alternative forwarding paths are obtained by exploring local BGP RIB. Multi-path forwarding on data plane can create a loop even within a stable network. MIFO solves this problem with a simple and practical approach. Several other challenges are also addressed including preventing cycling packet between iBGP peers and choosing the best alternative path from among multiple candidates. Our evaluations show that MIFO significantly improves the end-to-end throughput at the AS level, compared to traditional BGP and MIRO. For example, with only 50% of the ASes being MIFO capable, a significant percentage of the flows (about 40%) can use at least 50% of the inter-AS link capacity. In contrast, BGP and MIRO routing make less effective use of the inter-AS links, with only 7% and 17% of the flows can be so. Finally, we have developed a prototype implementation of MIFO on Linux with the forwarding engine in the kernel, with the routing daemon developed on XORP platform. The experiments on a test bed built with prototypes show that MIFO can improves the aggregate throughput by 81% compared with BGP routing.