Computer Science

Colloquium Details

Internet Routing Scalability

Abstract

Due to multi-homing, traffic engineering (TE), etc., more and more unaggregatable address fragments are pouring into the core network, which leads to the severe routing scalability problem of the Internet. In order to solve the problem, many solutions have been proposed, including host-based identifier/locator separation, edge/core network separation, compact routing, geographic routing, etc. One effective solution for this routing scalability problem, which requires only upgrades on individual routers, is FIB aggregation. Intrinsically, IP prefixes with numerical prefix matching and the same next hop can be aggregated. Very commonly, all previous studies assume that each IP prefix has one corresponding next hop, i.e., towards one optimal path. In this talk, we argue that a packet can be delivered to its destination through a path other than the one optimal path. Based on this observation, we for the first time propose Nexthop-Selectable FIB Aggregation that is fundamentally different from all previous aggregation schemes. IP prefixes are aggregated if they have numerical prefix matching and share one common next hop. Consequently, IP prefixes that cannot be aggregated, due to lack of the same next hop, are aggregated; and we achieve a substantially higher aggregation ratio.

Biography

Mingwei Xu received his B.S. degree (1994) and Ph.D. degree (1998) from the Department of Computer Science and Technology, Tsinghua University. He is now a professor and director of the Institute of Computer Networks in Tsinghua University. Besides, he is also a member of the technical steering committee of China Communications Standard Association (CCSA). His research interests include future Internet architecture, Internet routing and network virtualization. He has chaired or participated in more than 30 research projects, and published over 100 papers.