Network path advising service for the future Internet

Abstract

A common feature of emerging future Internet architectures is the ability for applications to select the path, or paths, their packets take between the source and destination. Unlike the current Internet architecture where routing protocols find a single (best) path between a source and destination, future Internet routing protocols will need to present applications with a choice of paths. Even if the routing service can return a list of possible paths, the huge number of potential paths and the need to know the current network conditions of each of the proposed paths will make it virtually impossible for applications to select the best set of paths, or just the best path. In this paper, we present a new network path advising service (NPAS) that helps future applications choose network paths. Given a set of possible paths, the NPAS service helps applications select appropriate paths based on both recent path measurements and end-to-end feedback collected from other applications. We describe the NPAS service abstraction, API calls, and a distributed architecture that achieves scalability by determining the most important things to monitor based on actual usage. Finally, we describe a prototype implementation of the NPAS service.