Routing fountains: Leveraging wide-area broadcast to improve mobile inter-domain routing

Abstract

Network mobility at continental scales requires transitioning between a collection of provider networks to maintain connectivity while traveling. Ideally, the transitions between networks occur transparently to end users therefore placing the burden of redirecting traffic on the inter-domain routing infrastructure. Performing inter-domain routing in mobile scenarios has been discouraged since BGP can exhibit prohibitively high convergence times and detrimental propagation patterns in large networks like the Internet. Alternative approaches and protocols have been suggested, but are still not ideal solutions as they do not provide optimal paths or do not facilitate routing with thousands of inter-organizational networks. To mitigate the current route propagation characteristics of BGP, we propose an architecture for inter-domain routing that augments hop-by-hop propagation with the wide scale broadcast distribution of routing data through routing fountains. In our approach we define the essential functional constructs that allow for the collection of partial path routing updates from subscribers, and utilize mass distribution mediums such as satellite downlinks to distribute this information globally. Receivers of the downlinked routing updates utilize legacy path knowledge and newly learned information to update local forwarding table entries. Our simulations demonstrate the potential for for our architecture to realize orders-of-magnitude improvements in system convergence time.