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Routing design in operational networks: a look from the inside

Authors:

David A. Maltz,

Gísli Hjálmtýsson,

Albert GreenbergAuthors Info & Claims

SIGCOMM '04: Proceedings of the 2004 conference on Applications, technologies, architectures, and protocols for computer communications

Pages 27 - 40

https://doi.org/10.1145/1015467.1015472

Published: 30 August 2004 Publication History

Abstract

In any IP network, routing protocols provide the intelligence that takes a collection of physical links and transforms them into a network that enables packets to travel from one host to another. Though routing design is arguably the single most important design task for large IP networks, there has been very little systematic investigation into how routing protocols are actually used in production networks to implement the goals of network architects. We have developed a methodology for reverse engineering a coherent global view of a network's routing design from the static analysis of dumps of the local configuration state of each router. Starting with a set of 8,035 configuration files, we have applied this method to 31 production networks. In this paper we present a detailed examination of how routing protocols are used in operational networks. In particular, the results show the conventional model of "interior" and "exterior" gateway protocols is insufficient to describe the diverse set of mechanisms used by architects, and we provide examples of the more unusual designs and examine their trade-offs. We discuss the strengths and weaknesses of our methodology, and argue that it opens paths towards new understandings of network behavior and design.

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Subramanian KAbhashkumar AD'Antoni LAkella ADonaldson ATorlak E(2020)Detecting network load violations for distributed control planesProceedings of the 41st ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation10.1145/3385412.3385976(974-988)Online publication date: 11-Jun-2020
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Subramanian KD'Antoni LAkella A(2019)Synthesis of Fault-Tolerant Distributed Router ConfigurationsACM SIGMETRICS Performance Evaluation Review10.1145/3308809.330885346:1(87-89)Online publication date: 17-Jan-2019
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Index Terms

Routing design in operational networks: a look from the inside
1. Networks
  1. Network architectures

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Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

SIGCOMM '04: Proceedings of the 2004 conference on Applications, technologies, architectures, and protocols for computer communications

August 2004

402 pages

ISBN:1581138628

DOI:10.1145/1015467

General Chair:
Raj Yavatkar
Intel Corporation
,
Program Chairs:
Ellen Zegura
Georgia Institute of Technology
,
Jennifer Rexford
AT&T Labs -- Research

ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review Volume 34, Issue 4
October 2004
385 pages
ISSN:0146-4833
DOI:10.1145/1030194
Issue’s Table of Contents

Copyright © 2004 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 30 August 2004

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August 30 - September 3, 2004

Oregon, Portland, USA

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Overall Acceptance Rate 462 of 3,389 submissions, 14%

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Cited By

Abhashkumar AGember-Jacobson AAkella ABhagwan RPorter G(2020)TiramisuProceedings of the 17th Usenix Conference on Networked Systems Design and Implementation10.5555/3388242.3388257(201-220)Online publication date: 25-Feb-2020
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/3388242.3388257
Subramanian KAbhashkumar AD'Antoni LAkella ADonaldson ATorlak E(2020)Detecting network load violations for distributed control planesProceedings of the 41st ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation10.1145/3385412.3385976(974-988)Online publication date: 11-Jun-2020
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3385412.3385976
Subramanian KD'Antoni LAkella A(2019)Synthesis of Fault-Tolerant Distributed Router ConfigurationsACM SIGMETRICS Performance Evaluation Review10.1145/3308809.330885346:1(87-89)Online publication date: 17-Jan-2019
https://doi.org/10.1145/3308809.3308853
Subramanian KD'Antoni LAkella A(2018)Synthesis of Fault-Tolerant Distributed Router ConfigurationsACM SIGMETRICS Performance Evaluation Review10.1145/3292040.321965246:1(87-89)Online publication date: 12-Jun-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3292040.3219652
Subramanian KD'Antoni LAkella APsounis KAkella AWierman A(2018)Synthesis of Fault-Tolerant Distributed Router ConfigurationsAbstracts of the 2018 ACM International Conference on Measurement and Modeling of Computer Systems10.1145/3219617.3219652(87-89)Online publication date: 12-Jun-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3219617.3219652
Lebrun DJadin MClad FFilsfils CBonaventure O(2018)Software Resolved NetworksProceedings of the Symposium on SDN Research10.1145/3185467.3185471(1-14)Online publication date: 28-Mar-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3185467.3185471
Subramanian KD'Antoni LAkella A(2018)Synthesis of Fault-Tolerant Distributed Router ConfigurationsProceedings of the ACM on Measurement and Analysis of Computing Systems10.1145/31794252:1(1-26)Online publication date: 3-Apr-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3179425
Xu LXu KShen MRen KFan JGuan CChen WLui JWang XWolf ALiu YHu C(2017)MINOSProceedings of the ACM Turing 50th Celebration Conference - China10.1145/3063955.3063996(1-10)Online publication date: 12-May-2017
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Fayaz SSharma TFogel AMahajan RMillstein TSekar VVarghese GKeeton KRoscoe T(2016)Efficient network reachability analysis using a succinct control plane representationProceedings of the 12th USENIX conference on Operating Systems Design and Implementation10.5555/3026877.3026895(217-232)Online publication date: 2-Nov-2016
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/3026877.3026895
Sung YTie XWong SZeng HBarcellos MCrowcroft JVahdat AKatti S(2016)RobotronProceedings of the 2016 ACM SIGCOMM Conference10.1145/2934872.2934874(426-439)Online publication date: 22-Aug-2016
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