The Internet faces many challenges, including security, management and control. The research project explores a future Internet/networking architecture based on a well-proven hierarchical architecture that is untested at global levels. The architecture includes a flexible addressing scheme and a compact four layer protocol stack. The radical change to the Internet architecture would be potentially transformative from a socioeconomic and business perspective. The scientific problems to be addressed are hence multidisciplinary. The technical and socioeconomic feasibility for the new network architecture, as well as the likely patterns of adoption for such a radical change are investigated.
Intellectual merit: This research asks how a fully hierarchical architecture, with adequate redundancy at different levels in this design, results in a robust structure that is also scalable. The solution distributes the "switching decisions," the management of how traffic moves from one point to another, to all levels of a hierarchy of communications providers: it allows the traffic to be managed independently wherever the traffic is flowing. The replaces present highly interdependent routing and network management architecture. The research will show how this architecture is robust and stable with a potential for future growth. A key contribution of the architecture is a scalable and flexible hierarchical addressing scheme, where key network functions are relegated to different levels in the hierarchy, and this also provides better management and control. The research includes proof-of-concept by interfacing diverse wireless networks in the architecture.
Broader impact: A new network architecture resulting from the SWITCHNET research could create radical changes in the economics of communications networks and ultimately have a very large impact on the economy and society. The conceptual architecture is almost ideally scalable. It is very much simpler to manage than the present architecture. As an example of the broad impact of SWITCHNET manageability, by enabling fundamentally better provider control, the architecture would open the door to new methods of identifying and pushing back denial of service, an economically and nationally much needed capability. Furthermore, this research could provide the breakthrough architecture for attaining the all-optical goal and thus address that national challenge to create a more energy-efficient network. Approaches to achieving such a purely optical communications infrastructure have long been sought.
This research is a close collaboration between technical and business researchers; the architecture research is supported by research on its business and socioeconomic impacts and adoption patterns. Understanding the existing Internet industry and creating appropriate incentives for its stakeholders will increase the chances that the technological innovations in this research will be embraced and implemented.
In IP networks, routers use routing protocols to discover and maintain routes to other networks. Routing table sizes maintained by current routing protocols increase linearly with increase in network size and is indicative of scalability issues which can manifest as performance deterioration. Also, the time taken for the network to adapt to topological changes increases with network size resulting in higher convergence times during which routing is unreliable. Patch and evolutionary solutions address the problem both at inter and intra domain level. Interior Gateway Protocols (IGP) such as Routing Information Protocol and OSPF were designed to work with IP. Large ISP networks use Link-State (LS) IGPs such as IS-IS or OSPF which uses the area concept to segment networks into manageable size. LS routing protocols require periodic updates and redistribution of updates to all routers in the network on link state changes. Each router running the LS routing protocol executes the Dijkstra’s algorithm on the link state information to populate routing tables. Dissemination of network-wide (or area-wide) link state information adversely impacts scalability and convergence time when using OSPF. A primary contribution in this work is the decoupling of the routing table sizes from the network size. A major goal was to investigate a solution that is acceptable to the service provider community. Thus, the proposed internetworking model derives from the structures used by ISPs to define their business relationships namely the tiers. The routing protocol proposed under this internetworking model is called the tiered routing protocol (TRP). A new tiered addressing scheme was introduced. The tiered address inherits attributes of the tiered structures. To decouple dependencies between connected entities, a nesting concept was introduced . TRP replaces both IP and routing protocol. TRP can be used both as an an IGP and as EGP avoiding the complex interworking between the inter-intra routing protocols. Its transition in the Internet was investigated using MPLS as a transition platform. Its performance was compared with OSPF and BGP using Emulab test-beds. The superiroity in performance achived with the new solution was very significant.
