FastCAT: A framework for fast routing table calculation incorporating multiple protocols.

Abstract

Currently, most network outages occur because of manual configuration errors. Therefore, it is essential to verify the correctness of network configurations before deployment. Computing the network control plane is a key technology for network configuration verification. We can verify the correctness of network configurations for fault tolerance by generating routing tables, as well as connectivity. However, existing routing table calculation tools have disadvantages such as lack of user-friendliness, limited expressiveness, and slower speed of routing table generation. In this paper, we present FastCAT, a framework for computing routing tables incorporating multiple protocols. FastCAT can simulate the interaction of multiple routing protocols and quickly generate routing tables based on configuration files and topology information. The key to FastCAT's performance is that FastCAT focuses only on the final stable state of the OSPF and IS-IS protocols, disregarding the transient states during protocol convergence. For RIPv2 and BGP, FastCAT computes the current protocol routing tables based on the protocol's previous state, retaining only the most recent protocol routing tables in the latest state. Experimental evaluations have shown that FastCAT generates routing tables more quickly and accurately than the state-of-the-art routing simulation tool, in a general network of around 200 routers.