Traditional routing systems have been designed by network engineers based on complex collections of objectives, policies, principles and past experiences. Due to limited human experience and capability, this manual design process severely impedes the design process of routing. The objective of this project is to bring a revolutionary change to this design process by building a highly flexible architecture, called Orchestra, for the automatic assembling and testing of a great variety of routing designs. Orchestra stores a large set of reusable "genes". Each gene is a small piece of computer code that implements a particular design for a small component of a routing system. The correctness of the "genes" and their mutual compatibility are automatically verified. Orchestra assembles various routing systems from verified "genes" and then tests them in both simulation and real environment. Based on the performance of the assembled protocols, Orchestra uses evolutionary algorithms to switch and tune designs of routing components to eventually identify the best design for a network setting.
Orchestra will greatly ease a network engineer's burden of implementing and evaluating an entire routing system. It can efficiently explore a much larger design space for routing systems than any single network engineer can. New areas for routing designs that are not explored by humans can be automatically discovered by Orchestra. The large collection of component designs in Orchestra will also provide a common platform for comparing and evaluating different design choices as well as serving education purposes.
