Abstract: Happy Packets - Initial Results

Randy Bush, IIJ
Tim Griffin, Intel Research
Zhuoqing Mao, University of Michigan
Eric Purpus, University of Oregon
Dan Stutzbach, University of Oregon

As routing researchers, we frequently hear comments such as:

And we often measure routing dynamics and say that some measurement is better or worse than another. But what is 'good' routing? How can we say one measurement shows routing is better than another unless we have metrics for routing quality? We often work on the assumption that number of prefixes, speed or completeness of convergence, etc., are measures of routing quality. But are these real measures of quality?

Perhaps because I am also an operator I think the measure that counts is whether the customers' packets reach their intended destinations. If the customers' packets are happy, the routing system (and other components) are doing their job. Therefore, I contend that, for the most part, we should be judging control plane quality by measuring the data plane. And we have well defined metrics for the data plane: delay, drop, jitter, reordering, etc. We also have tools with which to measure them.

It is not clear that happy packets require routing convergence as we speak of it today. If there is better routing information near the destination than at the source, maybe there is sufficient information near the source to get the packets to the better informed space. This is not that unlike routing proposals, such as Nimrod, where more detail is hidden the further you get from the announcer. If the routing system is noisy, i.e., there is is lot of routing traffic, that may not really be a bad thing.

We know convergence time can be reduced if announcement throttling (MRAI) is lessened. As long as network growth increases load on the routers below Moore's law, it is not clear we are in danger. This talk presents results of six months of measurements using multiple globally widespread streams directed at a multi-homed routing beacon.

About the Presenter
Randy Bush works as Principal Scientist at Internet Initiative Japan. Previously he spent a bit over a year at AT&T doing research and working on network architecture. He got some operational experience from being on the founding team at Verio, a backbone provider, from which he graduated as VP of Networking after five years. Before that, he was the principal engineer of RAINet, an ISP in Oregon and Washington, which was Verio's first acquisition. As PI for the Network Startup Resource Center, an NSF-supported pro bono effort, he has been involved for some years with the deployment and integration of appropriate networking technology in the developing world.

PDF presentation
RealVideo stream