NeTS: Small: Diverse and Resilient Beyond Paths

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

With advances in Internet applications and their insatiable demands for bandwidth, today's networks have grown rapidly both in scale and complexity. The growing scale and complexity also drastically increase the probability of failures. This is particularly the case in today's huge data centers. It is thus imperative that networks be designed with high capacity and with built-in resiliency. Routing is central to networking, as it determines whether and where packets are to be forwarded. It is therefore essential in ensuring network resiliency. Conventional routing protocols in IP/MPLS (Internet Protocol/Multiple Protocol Label Switching) networks that underpin much of today's networking infrastructure are primarily path-based and reactive. Various IP/MPLS (proactive) fast rerouting mechanisms have also been proposed; but most of them can only handle a single link failure. The combinatorial nature of multiple link failures renders most existing path-based fast rerouting approaches ineffectual; and their complexity grows rapidly, as the number of link/node failures increases. In order to achieve high network capacity, availability and reliability, new paradigm-shifting approaches are needed for the development of future diverse and resilient routing systems. Going beyond paths, this project advocates a novel routing paradigm -- dubbed routing via preorders -- which circumvents the limitations of conventional path-based routing schemes to effectively take advantage of topological diversity inherent in a network with rich topology for diverse and resilient routing, while at the same time meeting the quality-of-service requirements (e.g., bandwidth and latency) of applications or flows. Unlike conventional path-based routing, under the proposed routing via preorders paradigm no paths are explicitly specified for routing or forwarding; instead any sequence of connected nodes contained in the routing preorder can be used, thereby circumventing the rigidity and fragility limitations of paths while also avoiding the "combinatorial curse" challenge posed by path enumeration. Hence by design, routing via preorders has built-in resiliency and load-balancing capabilities. Broader Impact: If successful, the paradigm-shifting new routing framework advanced in this research project will provide the high diversity and resiliency demanded by the Internet services and critical physical infrastructures. All of these will bring significant benefits to users, service providers and society at large. The PI will actively involve undergraduate students -- especially female students and underrepresented minorities in the research project, e.g., via NSF REU grants as well as senior design courses and the Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program (UROP) at the PI's institution. The PI will release the implementation of routing via preorders using the software-defined networking (SDN) platform in public domains for wide distribution and adoption, and engage in other outreach activities.