Aman Shaikh WIRED Position Statement

UCSC

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Position Statement

WIRED 2003

Workshop on Internet Routing Evolution and Design

Aman Shaikh

University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC)

AT&T Labs - Research

Aman Shaikh WIRED Position Statement

UCSC

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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

Aman Shaikh WIRED Position Statement

UCSC

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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

Aman Shaikh WIRED Position Statement

UCSC

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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…:-)

Aman Shaikh WIRED Position Statement

UCSC

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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.

Aman Shaikh WIRED Position Statement

UCSC

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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?

Aman Shaikh WIRED Position Statement

UCSC

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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

Aman Shaikh WIRED Position Statement

UCSC

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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