acm sigcomm

Recent studies have shown that the current primitives for connecting multiple routing protocol instances (OSPF 1, OSPF 2, EIGRP 10, etc.) are pervasively deployed in enterprise networks and the Internet. Furthermore, these primitives are extremely vulnerable to routing anomalies (route oscillations, forwarding loops, etc.) and at the same time too rigid to support some of today’s operational objectives. In this paper, we propose a new theory to reason about routing properties across multiple routing instances. The theory directly applies to both link-state and vector routing protocols.

Recent studies reveal that the routing structures of operational networks are much more complex than a simple BGP/IGP hierarchy, highlighted by the presence of many distinct instances of routing protocols. However, the glue (how routing protocol instances interact and exchange routes among themselves) is still little understood or studied.