Practical and efficient internet routing with competing interests

  • Authors:
  • Ratul Mahajan;David J. Wetherall;Thomas E. Anderson

  • Affiliations:
  • University of Washington;University of Washington;University of Washington

  • Venue:
  • Practical and efficient internet routing with competing interests
  • Year:
  • 2005

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Abstract

A fundamental characteristic of the Internet, and increasingly other networked systems, is that it is controlled by many independent parties that act in their own interests. These parties, known as Internet service providers (ISPs), cooperate to provide global connectivity even though they often have competing interests. With current routing protocols, this competition induces each ISP to select paths that are optimal within its own network. The result is that paths across multiple networks can be poor from a global perspective. I present Wiser, a protocol that shows it is possible to achieve efficient global routing in practice even when ISPs select paths in their own interests. Wiser is based on "barter" between pairs of adjacent ISPs: each ISP selects paths that respect the concerns of the neighboring ISP as well as its own in return for the neighbor doing the same. To encourage ISPs to adopt Wiser, it is designed to maintain their autonomy, e.g., it does not require sensitive internal information to be disclosed, and individual ISPs do not lose compared to routing in the Internet today. Wiser can be implemented as an extension to current Internet routing protocols and deployed incrementally. To evaluate Wiser, I experiment with measured ISP topologies and a router-level prototype. I find that, unlike Internet routing today, the efficiency of Wiser is close to that of an ideal routing that globally optimizes network paths for metrics such as path length or band width provisioning. I further show that these benefits come at a low cost: the overhead of Wiser is similar to that of the current Internet routing protocol in terms of routing messages and computation.