acm sigcomm

We present a new routing protocol, pathlet routing, in which networks advertise fragments of paths, called pathlets, that sources concatenate into end-to-end source routes. Intuitively, the pathlet is a highly exible building block, capturing policy constraints as well as enabling an exponentially large number of path choices. In particular, we show that pathlet routing can emulate the policies of BGP, source routing, and several recent multipath proposals.

Data centers deploy a variety of middleboxes (e.g., firewalls, load balancers and SSL offloaders) to protect, manage and improve the performance of applications and services they run. Since existing networks provide limited support for middleboxes, administrators typically overload path selection mechanisms to coerce traffic through the desired sequences of middleboxes placed on the network path. These ad-hoc practices result in a data center network that is hard to congure and maintain, wastes middlebox resources, and cannot guarantee middlebox traversal under network churn.

Current distributed routing paradigms (such as link-state, distancevector, and path-vector) involve a convergence process consisting of an iterative exploration of intermediate routes triggered by certain events such as link failures. The convergence process increases router load, introduces outages and transient loops, and slows reaction to failures. We propose a new routing paradigm where the goal is not to reduce the convergence times but rather to eliminate the convergence process completely.

The Internet has evolved greatly from its original incarnation. For instance, the vast majority of current Internet usage is data retrieval and service access, whereas the architecture was designed around host-to-host applications such as telnet and ftp. Moreover, the original Internet was a purely transparent carrier of packets, but now the various network stakeholders use middleboxes to improve security and accelerate applications.