A Novel Approach to Interior Gateway Routing

Most ISPs and Autonomous Systems (AS) on the Internet today use Open Shortest Path First (OSPF) or Intermediate-System-to-Intermediate-System (IS-IS) as the Interior Gateway Protocol (IGP). Both protocols use the Link- State routing approach and require distribution of link state information to all routers in a network or in an area. Any topological changes require redistributing updates and refreshing routing tables. This results in high convergence times. During convergence, packet routing becomes unreliable. During the years as network sizes have grown, the routing table sizes have also exhibited a linear growth. This is indicative of scalability issues in the current routing approaches and could be a limiting factor for future growth. Future Internet initiatives, which were started worldwide almost a decade ago, have enabled novel approaches to address the routing problem. In this article, such a novel interior gateway routing approach is presented. The approach leverages the tiered structure existing among ISP networks, AS, and in general most networks. The routing protocol was thus named the Tiered Routing Protocol (TRP). Though TRP can be used for both inter- and intra-AS routing, in this article, it is presented as a candidate protocol for intra-AS routing. TRP operations are supported by a tiered addressing scheme. Use of TRP replaces both the Internet Protocol (IP) and the routing protocol. The rationale for TRP and its details followed by its evaluation over the US national testbed namely Emulab are presented in this article. TRP's performance is compared with OSPF to highlight its major contributions to address routing scalability.