Pathlet Routing

Pathlet routing is an exciting new routing protocol, proposed by Brighten Godfrey, a promising new faculty member at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Pathlet Routing is designed to provide more flexibility to both internet providers and users. In a nutshell, it's source routing over a virtual topology (​http://www.cs.uiuc.edu/homes/pbg/pathlets/)

After its initial appearance at the HotNets workshop in 2008 and its complete presentation in SIGCOMM 2009, Brighten and his team are ready to make a real deployment and test its premises. Pathlets are an alternative to IP routing and thus, it's not feasible to deploy the protocol natively for large scale testing within the current Internet architecture where IP is the only option.

GENI is the ideal environment where Pathlet routing can be deployed and matured before integrating to the global Internet.

Pathlet Routing in GENI

The Pathlet team has been experimenting in GENI since 2010. In GEC8 they demoed using a small deployment within the GPO lab, while in GEC9 they took part in the plenary demostration, showcasing the benefits of Pathlet routing in a continental deployment spanning 5 campuses across US. A detailed progress of the Pathlet deployment is captured ​here. The setup of the final deployment is captured ​here