UCSC 1 Aman ShaikhWIRED Position Statement Position Statement WIRED 2003 Workshop on Internet Routing Evolution and Design Aman Shaikh University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC) AT&T Labs - Research

UCSC 2 Aman ShaikhWIRED Position Statement Outline Routing at the box-level Routing at the network-level Routing system as a whole Analytical and simulation models Reducing the pain of administrators

UCSC 3 Aman ShaikhWIRED Position Statement Routing at Box-level Router Design –Router is a complex beast... hardware and software issues, protocol implementation, resource contention, forwarding table construction/updates etc... –Vendors need to de-mystify the beast How much can they open up? Black-box characterization –Better analytical and simulation models –Vendor-independent benchmarking

UCSC 4 Aman ShaikhWIRED Position Statement Routing at Network-level Data, data, data... –Smart collection of data How to collect “right” amount and kind of data from the “right” set of vantage-points? –How to make the data accessible to researchers without compromising proprietary nature of the data? –Joining of data from multiple sources Not as easy as one might think; believe Renata…:-)

UCSC 5 Aman ShaikhWIRED Position Statement Routing System as a Whole Most of the research has focused on protocols in isolation Time to focus on the system as a whole –How do protocols interact? at box and network levels in terms of convergence, stability, reliability and availability –Example: making “super-fast” IGPs has received a fair bit of attention. However, most of the traffic is routed by BGP which in turn relies on IGPs to resolve next-hops. Convergence story is not as simple as one might think.

UCSC 6 Aman ShaikhWIRED Position Statement Analytical and Simulation Models Need analytical and simulation models –To study large network-wide dynamics –To understand trade-offs between design alternatives –To analyze impact of new features and extensions Where do we go from NS2 and dumbbell topologies!!?? –Is SSFNET the answer? –Should we look at other fields? –How do we validate models?

UCSC 7 Aman ShaikhWIRED Position Statement Reducing the Administrators’ Pain “Network core is simple” is a myth :-( How can we help the administrators beyond giving them a load of Tylenols? –Network assessment –Configuration management From device-level to network-level Tweaking the knobs –Debugging routing problems Especially those spanning multiple domains –Seamless hardware and software upgrade

UCSC 8 Aman ShaikhWIRED Position Statement Wiring it up… Routing at the box-level Routing at the network-level Routing system as a whole Analytical and simulation models Reducing the pain of administrators