Design of a Scalable Path Service for the Internet

Despite the world-changing success of the Internet, shortcomings in its routing and forwarding system have become increasingly apparent. One symptom is an escalating tension between users and providers over the control of routing and forwarding of packets: providers understandably want to control use of their infrastructure, and users understandably want paths with sufficient quality-of-service (QoS) to improve the performance of their applications. As a result, users resort to various “hacks” such as sending traffic through intermediate end-systems, and the providers fight back with mechanisms to inspect and block such traffic. To enable users and providers to jointly control routing and forwarding policies, recent research has considered various architectural approaches in which provider- level route determination occurs separately from forwarding. With this separation, provider-level path computation and selection can be provided as a centralized service: users (or their applications) send path queries to a path service to obtain provider- level paths that meet their application-specific QoS requirements. At the same time, providers can control the use of their infrastructure by dictating how packets are forwarded across their network. The separation of routing and forwarding offers many advantages, but also brings a number of challenges such as scalability. In particular, the path service must respond to path queries in a timely manner and periodically collect topology information containing load-dependent (i.e., performance) routing information. We present a new design for a path service that makes use of expensive pre- computations, parallel on-demand computations on performance information, and caching of recently computed paths to achieve scalability. We demonstrate that, us- ing commodity hardware with a modest amount of resources, the path service can respond to path queries with acceptable latency under a realistic workload. The ser- vice can scale to arbitrarily large topologies through parallelism. Finally, we describe how to utilize the path service in the current Internet with existing Internet applica- tions