A Structured Approach to Routing in the Internet

Advent of new content delivery models and proliferation of applications such as IoT, machine-to-machine communications and industry automation are placing new demands on the Internet for improved service-specific support. This calls for change in either the Internet routing or addressing schemes or both. Given the wide deployment of the Internet protocol (IP) and its routing protocols, such as the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) and Open Shortest Path First (OSPF), modifying and/or substituting these protocols would face severe challenges. We decided instead, to investigate an IP-agnostic solution called the Expedited Internet Bypass Protocol (EIBP) to work in parallel with IP while operating entirely independent of Layer 3 protocols. EIBP uses network structures (physical or virtual) to automate assigning of routable addresses to Internet routers and thus voids the need for a routing protocol; this applies to both inter and intra-AS routing. EIBP can be used to expedite specific traffic flows as we bypasses all traffic in Layer 3. EIBP was coded and prototype tested on routers from the Global Environment for Network Innovation (GENI) testbed for intra-AS routing. In this article, we highlight the significant performance improvements achieved with EIBP compared to IP with OSPF or BGP. We describe one approach to extend EIBP for inter-AS routing and highlight the benefits. EIBP can also support virtual mobility domains to handle mobile users.