The Border Gateway Protocol(BGP) is the protocol used to administer and control the flow of traffic between the separately administered networks that connect together to form the Internet. Because many of the current failings of the Internet are due to BGP's poor performance and limited functionality, this project aims to explore incrementally deployable ways to leverage Software-Defined Networking's (SDN) power to improve interdomain routing. These improvements will facilitate higher return on investment via load balancing and traffic engineering, increased capabilities to respond to denial-of-service attacks, and new services such as application specific peering where two networks exchange traffic only for certain applications (e.g., video). Additionally, the project will improved the ability of network operators to track and engineer peering relationships based on traffic volume.
This project exploits the re-emergence of Internet eXchange Points (IXPs) to create Software Defined eXchanges (SDXs) that fundamentally change network control. The project has two major themes: (1) near-term solutions that coexist with BGP; and (2) long-term solutions that replace BGP entirely, using IXPs as the dominant mode of interconnection. In terms of near-term solutions, the central intellectual question explores the improvements that are possible when a single IXP deploys SDN-based technology. Longer term, assuming that SDXes will one day become more prominent, the project is developing solutions that replace BGP entirely with an SDX-mediated Internet, where all peering takes place at these interconnection points. Such a design would make policy only relevant to the endpoints (the sending and receiving domains) and would eliminate policy complications from intermediate providers. The project is also investigating how these endpoint policies might emerge, how the inter-SDX routing is done, how the longer-term design might be incrementally deployed, and what its impact might be in the provider ecosystem. The SDX design may point the way to a more stable, secure, and economically sound Internet.
