Evaluation of tiered routing protocol in floating cloud tiered internet architecture

Abstract

Clean slate future Internet initiatives have been ongoing for a few years. An important consideration in the eventual deployment of solutions for such Internet architectures is the testing and validation of the design and its scalability in realistic network environments. Large scale emulation and experimentation testbeds sponsored and funded by major research organizations worldwide provide a suitable platform for the purpose. In this article, we present the implementation details of a new network and routing protocol that entirely replaces IP and its routing protocols from the protocol stack to provide efficient routing and forwarding of packets in a clean slate Floating Cloud Tiered (FCT) Internet architecture. The FCT architecture leverages the tier structure existing among ISPs, and has a new addressing and routing schema based on tiers. In this article, the implementation and evaluation details of the network protocol with these two features, namely the tiered addressing and tier-based routing using the Global Environmental for Network Innovations (GENI) testbed are presented. The performance of the protocol is also compared with Open Shortest Path First (OSPF) implemented over the GENI testbed for identical network topologies.