User Selected Routes
Overview
User-selected routes are desirable for both economic and technical reasons. Economically, user-selected routes are a key factor in maintaining the competitiveness of the ISP marketplace. Technically, user-selected routes provide a fundamental mean for improving the performance and reliability of network communications, because they allow end-systems to use multiple diverse paths concurrently and reduce the dependence on a single network path that has undesirable characteristics. In addition, the techniques developed for user-selected routes can also be extended to intra-domain routing to improve the reliability of networks.
End system can send packets along different network routes upon its selection
This project focuses on the following two areas:
- Address the technical challenges in enabling user-selected routes
- Extend the techniques we develop to enable intra-domain route selection to achieve disruption-free routing. More details about the research progress in this area could be found in the SafeGuard project page.
Challenges
- Stable Route Selection: A key challenge in enabling user-selected routes is to prevent path oscillation. Previous theoretical works show that independent user choices can lead to path oscillations, which might result in poor performance.
- Network Inefficiency under Multi-path Routing: Another challenge of user-selected routes is how to prevent the inefficiency of network when users use multiple paths simultaneously. Our simulation results have indicated that the average throughput of each user may reduce for 50% under multi-path routing. This is because by using multiple paths users are likely to use longer paths which consume more bandwidth than necessary.
- Denial of Service Flooding Attacks: A major thrust of our proposed work is to address the various security issues associated with source routing. DoS attack is more serious a problem under source routing scenario than under current routing architecture. It can simultaneously flood multiple network paths, or cause path oscillation by flooding one path first, and then flooding an alternative path after legitimate hosts switch to that path.
- Net Neutrality and User Choice: Recent debates on Net Neutrality signifies the lack of competition in the broadband access market. The power of end users to choose wide area provides separately from their local access provides will increase the competitive pressure in the backbone ISP market, but may also prevent access ISPs from exporting their market power to the backbone market. As a result local access ISPs might discriminate packets based on contents or ownership in their own networks, and hence break Net Neutrality.
- Intra-domain Route Selection: How to exploit multiple forwarding paths in intra-domain network is a key challenge of achieving disruption free routing. When failures happen in the default forwarding path, packets will be lost until the routing system has re-converged, which takes non-trivial amount of time.
Publications
- Ang Li, Xiaowei Yang, and David Wetherall, SafeGuard: Responsive Routing with Consistent Forwarding, Duke Technical Report, 2008. PDF. A shorter version is in submission
- Ang Li, Yanbin Lu, Xiaowei Yang, Price of Path Diversity: in Practice and in Theory, work in progress, 2008. PDF
- Ang Li, Xiaowei Yang, and David Wetherall, Towards Disruption-Free Intra-Domain Routing, in ACM SIGCOMM Student Poster, 2008. PDF
- Xiaowei Yang, Auction, but Don’t Block, in ACM SIGCOMM NetEcon'08 workshop. PDF
- Ang Li, Pierre Francois, and Xiaowei Yang, On Improving the Efficiency and Manageability of NotVia, in ACM CONEXT, 2007. PDF
People
Funding
This work is supported by the National Science Foundation under Award 0627166
Related Work
Overlay Routing & Source Routing
Path Diversity
Selfish Routing