Scale-free networks and scalable interdomain routing

Trabalho apresentado no âmbito do Mestrado em Engenharia Informática, como requisito parcial para obtenção do grau de Mestre em Engenharia Informática

The exponential growth of the Internet, due to its tremendous success, has brought to light some limitations of the current design at the routing and arquitectural level, such as scalability and convergence as well as the lack of support for traffic engineering, mobility, route differentiation and security. Some of these issues arise from the design of the current architecture, while others are caused by the interdomain routing scheme - BGP. Since it would be quite difficult to add support for the aforementioned issues, both in the interdomain architecture and in the in the routing scheme, various researchers believe that a solution can only achieved via a new architecture and (possibly) a new routing scheme. A new routing strategy has emerged from the studies regarding large-scale networks, which is suitable for a special type of large-scale networks which characteristics are independent of network size: scale-free networks. Using the greedy routing strategy a node routes a message to a given destination using only the information regarding the destination and its neighbours, choosing the one which is closest to the destination. This routing strategy ensures the following remarkable properties: routing state in the order of the number of neighbours; no requirements on nodes to exchange messages in order to perform routing; chosen paths are the shortest ones. This dissertation aims at: studying the aforementioned problems, studying the Internet configuration as a scale-free network, and defining a preliminary path onto the definition of a greedy routing scheme for interdomain routing.