Intra-domain routing with pathlets

Internal routing inside the network of an Internet Service Provider (ISP) affects the performance of lots of services that the ISP offers to its customers and is therefore critical to adhere to Service Level Agreements (SLAs), achieve a top-quality offer, and earn revenue. Existing technologies (most notably, MPLS) offer limited (e.g., with RSVP-TE), tricky (e.g., with OSPF metrics), or no control on internal routing paths. Recent research results address these shortcomings, but miss a few elements that would enable their application in an ISP's network. We introduce a new control plane, based on pathlet routing (Godfrey et al., 2009) [2], designed to operate in the network of an ISP and offering several nice features: it enables steering of network paths at different levels of granularity; it is scalable and robust; it supports independent configuration of specific network regions and differentiation of Quality of Service (QoS) levels; it can nicely coexist with other control planes and is independent of the data plane used in the ISP's network. Besides formally introducing the messages and algorithms of our control plane, we propose an experimental scalability assessment and comparison with OSPF, conducted in the simulation framework OMNeT++. © 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.