Metarouting

  • Authors:

  • Timothy G. Griffin;Joäo Luís Sobrinho

  • Affiliations:

  • University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK;Instituto de Telecomunicações & Instituto Superior Téécnico, Lisbon, Portugal

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 2005 conference on Applications, technologies, architectures, and protocols for computer communications
  • Year:
  • 2005

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Abstract

There is a shortage of routing protocols that meet the needs of network engineers. This has led to BGP being pressed into service as an IGP, despite its lack of convergence guarantees. The development, standardization, and deployment of routing protocols, or even minor changes to existing protocols, are very difficult tasks. We present an approach called Metarouting that defines routing protocols using a high-level and declarative language. Once an interpreter for a metarouting language is implemented on a router, a network operator would have the freedom to implement and use any routing protocol definable in the language. We enforce a clean separation of protocol mechanisms (link-state, path-vector, adjacency maintenance, and so on) from routing policy (how routes are described and compared). The Routing Algebra framework of Sobrinho [25] is used as the theoretical basis for routing policy languages. We define the Routing Algebra Meta-Language (RAML) that allows for the construction of a large family of routing algebras and has the key property that correctness conditions --- guarantees of convergence with respect to the chosen mechanisms --- can be derived automatically for each expression defining a new routing algebra.