AIR: a Scalable Inter-domain Routing Protocol

As the Internet booms in size and evolves toward a ubiquitous information infrastructure, its interdomain routing mechanism is going to encounter predictable scalability problems in the future. This paper introduces a new scalable inter-domain routing protocol, AS-level Inter-domain Routing (AIR) which is tailored for the Internet that we can envision today. We design AIR at the routing granularity of the Autonomous System (AS) level and take advantages of the Multi Protocol Label Switch (MPLS) to facilitate the packet forwarding between ASes. Compared with the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP), AIR enhances the routing scalability of the next generation Internet while preserving the economic/administrative model of the inter-domain operations. Our design focuses on MPLS enabled AS-level transit routes and retains the flexibility of supporting inter-domain routing policies as well as rational inter-domain traffic engineering. Our proposal synthetically adopts various practical techniques and integrates them into a fruitful design.