A NETWORK PATH ADVISING SERVICE

A common feature of emerging future Internet architectures is the ability for applications to select the path, or paths, their packets take between a 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 present applications with a set of paths and allow them to select the most appropriate path. Although this enables applications to be actively involved in the selection of the paths their packets travel, 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. To tackle this problem, we introduce 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. By analyzing existing traffic patterns, we will demonstrate it is feasible for NPAS to monitor only a few nodes and links and yet be able to offer advice about the most important paths used by a high percentage of traffic. Finally, we describe a prototype implementation of the NPAS components as well as a simulation model used to evaluate the NPAS architecture