wiki:PathletRouting

Version 2 (modified by nriga@bbn.com, 14 years ago) (diff)

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Summary

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. By representing the Internet as a virtual topology independent of the physical topology, network owners can declare services and policy constraints very expressively. By allowing users to select any path within this virtual topology, users can select routes that are appropriate to the application or more efficient and can react quickly to dynamics in the network.

Pathlet routing was first presented at HotNets 2008, a prestigious networking workshop on innovative network research. A completed version was also published in SIGCOMM 2009, one of the most competitive and influential conferences within the networking community.

For more information refer to pathlet's website

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. For Gec8 we have integrated the pathlet routing technology within the GPO's GENI infrastructure. We are now looking for expanding this deployment in more GENI sites.

Technical Requirements for GENI Integration

In order to be able to support Pathlet routing within a GENI site, it's needed :

  • an OpenFlow switch running version 1.0 of the OpenFlow protocol
  • the switch should be controlled by a Flowvisor, preferably locally but if this is not available, GPO can provide a FlowVisor running at the GPO lab
  • the ability to point traffic from the pathlet slice to a Nox controller running remotely (@GPO)

In order to be able to fully test the pathlet architecture, some end hosts should also be deployed in some sites :

Contact info

PI Brighten Godfrey pbg@illinois.edu
grad student Ashish Vulimir vulimir1@illinois.edu
grad student Qingxi Li cs.qingxi.li@gmail.com