Elsevier

Computer Networks

Volume 127, 9 November 2017, Pages 13-30
Computer Networks

EIR: Edge-aware inter-domain routing protocol for the future mobile internet

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.comnet.2017.07.013Get rights and content

Abstract

This work describes a clean-slate inter-domain routing protocol designed to meet the needs of the future mobile Internet. In particular, we describe the edge-aware inter-domain routing (EIR) protocol which provides new abstractions, such as aggregated-nodes (aNodes) and virtual-links (vLinks) for expressing network topologies and edge network properties necessary to address mobility related routing scenarios which are inadequately supported by the border gateway protocol (BGP) in use today. Specific use-cases addressed by EIR include emerging mobility service scenarios such as multi-homing across WiFi and cellular, multipath routing over several access networks, and anycast access from mobile devices to replicated cloud services. It is shown that EIR can be used to realize efficient routing strategies for the mobility use-cases under consideration, while also providing support for a range of inter-domain routing policies currently associated with BGP. Simulation results for protocol overhead are presented for a global-scale CAIDA topology, leading to an identification of parameters necessary to obtain a good balance between overhead and routing table convergence time. A Click-based proof-of-concept implementation of EIR on the ORBIT testbed is described and used to validate performance and functionality for selected mobility use-cases, including mobile data services with open WiFi access points and mobile platforms such as buses operating in an urban area.

Introduction

The inter-domain routing architecture of the Internet is currently based on the border gateway protocol (BGP) standards [1]. BGP, which was introduced about 25 years ago, represented a major advance in networking because it provided fully distributed, non-hierarchical routing mechanisms between autonomous systems (ASes) at a global scale. More importantly, BGP provides a flexible framework for policy-based routing taking into account local preferences and business relationships [2]. The Internet is currently going through a fundamental change driven by the rapid rise of mobile end-points such as smartphones and embedded Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices [3]. The emerging “mobile Internet” will require new approaches to both intra- and inter-domain routing in order to deal with increased dynamism caused by end-point, network and service mobility. This dynamism can take various forms, ranging from conventional end host mobility and edge network mobility to multi-homing and multi-network access associated with emerging hetnet and 5G cellular scenarios [4]. In addition, mobile edge cloud scenarios [5] involve dynamic cloud service migration across networks, requiring anycast routing capabilities which are not readily supported by current inter-domain protocols. A common thread across all these use-cases is the need for a better visibility of the network connectivity graph and the quality of alternative paths to the mobile end-point in order to be able to make more intelligent and informed routing decisions that takes edge and access network into account.

Emerging Internet requirements such as mobility and content have motivated several clean-slate Internet design projects such as Named Data Network (NDN) [6], XIA [7] and MobilityFirst [8]. Previously published works on these architectures have addressed mobility requirements at the intra-domain level [9], [10], but inter-domain routing for the future Internet remains an important open problem. In this paper, we first motivate the need for clean-slate approaches to inter-domain based on several use-cases, and then describe a specific new design called EIR (edge-aware inter-domain routing) intended to meet emerging requirements. The proposed protocol provides new abstractions for expressing network topology and edge network properties necessary to support a full range of mobility services such as multi-homing over WiFi and cellular, multipath routing over multiple access networks, and anycast access to cloud services from mobile devices.

The proposed edge-aware inter-domain routing protocol was developed as a part of the MobilityFirst Future Internet Architecture (FIA) project [8] aimed at a clean-slate redesign of the IP protocol architecture. It is noted here that clean-slate research projects like MobilityFirst do recognize the fact that the Internet cannot be changed overnight particularly when dealing with core protocols such as inter-domain routing. However, with the advent of software-based network functionality, it is now increasingly practical to introduce new Internet protocol concepts on a trial basis. In particular, the recently proposed “SDX (software-defined exchange)” concept makes it possible for networks to voluntarily participate in enhanced or new protocol frameworks for inter-domain routing, as discussed by Feamster et al.  [11]. For example, a new inter-domain routing protocol like EIR can be implemented by a small number of cooperating ASes as an SDX-hosted function that supplements BGP with the goal of efficiently supporting a specific service such as multi-homing over WiFi and cellular networks. Such an initial deployment can be limited to 10’s of networks (content provider, a few transit networks, cellular access network operators, etc.) with the sole purpose of optimizing multi-homed service delivery. As additional networks become aware of the benefits and join these special purpose networks, there could be a critical mass effect leading to broad adoption of a new routing protocol standard. While it is difficult to predict when these large-scale changes in the network will occur, there is no doubt that significant changes to BGP will occur over a ~10 year time horizon, and it is thus timely and important to study inter-domain routing techniques designed to meet future needs.

The main contributions of this work are:

  • (i)

    Identifying and reasoning about the new requirements of the future mobile Internet.

  • (ii)

    Designing a specific protocol architecture (EIR) which realizes these requirements.

  • (iii)

    Presenting a careful evaluation of EIR through simulation, emulation, and implementation to show the feasibility and efficiency of the newly proposed architecture.

Section snippets

Emerging network service usecases

In this section, we consider some of the emerging use-cases such as mobility, multipath, edge peering, in further detail and discuss their implications on inter-domain routing.

EIR protocol design

In this section we present the key building blocks of EIR. First we describe the design rationale and concepts, followed by in-depth protocol features.

Policy specifications

Policy support is an integral part of any inter-domain routing protocol as network operators need to control the traffic flowing through their networks in a flexible manner that is consistent with business and performance objectives. In this section we discuss the range of existing inter-domain polices as well as a few of the emerging policy requirements that can be supported through the EIR framework.

Evaluation

In this section, we evaluate the EIR protocol in terms of scalability and mobility service performance through a large-scale Click software router based prototype evaluation and an Internet-scale simulation study. Section 5.1 describes the setup and insights from an Internet scale simulation effort, which is followed by Section 5.2, that describes the implementation details. Finally, we also describe the results from our in-depth mobility study experiments based on the prototype implementation.

Related work

There has been a considerable amount of work done in improving inter-domain routing which can be broadly classified into two categories: (1) extensions to BGP, and (2) clean-slate routing proposals.

Conclusions

In this paper, we have proposed the edge-aware inter-domain (EIR) routing protocol as a potential solution for inter-network routing in the future mobile Internet. The proposed architecture has been shown to provide improved support and flexibility for routing to wireless devices, network-assisted multipath routing, routing to multiple interfaces (multi-homing) and service anycast. Our results show that even with increased expressiveness of network structure and node/link properties, the

Shreyasee Mukherjee received her B.Tech in electrical engineering from Bengal Engineering and Science University (BESU) Shibpur, India in 2011. She completed her M.S. in electrical & computer engineering from Rutgers University, New Jersey, USA in 2013 and is currently pursuing a Ph.D. From the same. Her research interests include clean slate future internet architectures, analysis of routing protocols and mobility support for emerging 5G networks.

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  • Cited by (0)

    Shreyasee Mukherjee received her B.Tech in electrical engineering from Bengal Engineering and Science University (BESU) Shibpur, India in 2011. She completed her M.S. in electrical & computer engineering from Rutgers University, New Jersey, USA in 2013 and is currently pursuing a Ph.D. From the same. Her research interests include clean slate future internet architectures, analysis of routing protocols and mobility support for emerging 5G networks.

    Shravan Sriram received his B.Tech and M.S. in computer engineering from Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham, India in 2013 and Rutgers University in 2015 respectively. Currently he is a software engineer at Turbonomic Inc. where he works on the decision making engine of the product. His areas of interest are adaptive routing schemes for large-scale networks, future internet architecture for wireless /mobile cloud networking, resource allocation in virtualized systems and use of pricing models for QoS adherence and cloud migration.

    Tam Vu received the B.S in computer science from Hanoi University of Technology, Vietnam in 2006, and the Ph.D. in computer science from WINLAB, Department of Computer Science, Rutgers University, New Jersey, USA, in 2013. He is currently an assistant professor and Director of the Mobile and Networked Systems Lab at the Department of Computer Science, University of Colorado Boulder. His research interest is mobile healthcare, mobile centric network, mobile communication, and mobile security. He is the recipient of CRC Interdisciplinary Fellowship at UC Denver 2015. He received Google Faculty Research Award in 2014 for his work in Chrome browser authentication. He received best paper award for inventing new form of communication, called Capacitive Touch Communication, in ACM MobiCom 2012. He was also a recipient of ACM MobiCom 2011 best paper award for his work on driver phone use detection. His research also received wide press coverage including CNN TV, NY Times, The Wall Street Journal, National Public Radio, MIT Technology Review, Yahoo News, among other venues.

    Dipankar Raychaudhuri is Distinguished Professor, Electrical & Computer Engineering and Director, WINLAB (Wireless Information Network Lab) at Rutgers University. As WINLAB’s Director, he is responsible for an internationally recognized industry-university research center specializing in wireless technology. He is also PI for several large U.S. National Science Foundation funded projects including the “ORBIT” wireless testbed and the MobilityFirst future Internet architecture. Dr. Raychaudhuri has previously held corporate R& D positions including: Chief Scientist, Iospan Wireless (2000–2001), AGM & Dept Head, NEC Laboratories (1993–1999) and Head, Broadband Communications, Sarnoff Corp (1990–1992). He obtained the B.Tech (Hons) from IIT Kharagpur in 1976 and the M.S. and Ph.D degrees from SUNY, Stony Brook in 1978 and 1979. He is a Fellow of the IEEE.

    Research supported by NSF Future Internet Architecture (FIA) grant CNS-134529.

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