Source-Directed Path Diversity in the Interdomain Routing

Abstract

The Internet has abundant path redundancy, especially in the interdomain routing. However, current routing system can not exploit the Internet path diversity and utilize the disjoint end-to-end paths efficiently. The unawareness of sources to the path selection and the best paths advertisement mechanism in the interdomain routing make it difficult to use disjoint end-to-end paths. In this paper, we present the Source-Directed Path Diversity (SDPD), leveraging which sources can specify the alternate paths to forward the traffic besides the default path. In SDPD, the packets carry the Source-Directed Tag (SDT) in the packet headers to hint the BGP routers the preference of the sources on the path selection, while the BGP routers forward the packets independently based on the sources' indication. Moreover, we propose the multipath advertisement of the BGP route reflectors in SDPD to reduce the filtration of the redundant paths in the interdomain routing. We evaluate the SDPD through simulations over a synthetic Internet-like topology. The simulation results show that the SDPD can exploit alternate paths with low similarity and stretch efficiently