IoF - Internet on FIRE

Project website - Fed4FIRE+ Open Call 5

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IoF - Internet on FIRE

The goal of the project (funded by the Fed4FIRE+ Open Call 5) is to extend the concepts of “Pop-Routing” to the Border Gateway Protocl (BGP), the Internet routing protocol, to improve its performance in terms of convergence. Pop-Routing automatically tunes the frequency of the protocol messages to guarantee the optimal trade-off between overhead and convergence speed. In Infocom 2018 we presented the first fully distributed, exact algorithm to compute centrality using Bellman-Ford (BF): Pop-Routing can now be ported to Distance/Path-Vector protocols.

BGP, the only Inter-AS (Autonomous System) protocol of the Internet, is the glue that binds pieces of the Internet and keeps global communications in tune. BGP has a slow convergence: two configuration parameters (timers) have a high impact on BGP convergence speed, but there is no consensus on how to change their default value to a better one. Our distributed centrality computation can effectively be used in BGP, as we have recently shown in this thesis. To prove that the convergence of Internet can be speed-up exploiting Pop-Routing, we need to test the distributed centrality computation on the BGP extension supporting Pop-Routing and measure the actual speed-up on a real implementation on sufficiently large topologies.

To achieve this goal Internet on FIRE will pursue three goals, corresponding to three Work Packages:

  • Finalise, implement and test the distributed centrality computation of Pop-Routing on the BIRD daemon, the most popular open source implementation of BGP;
  • Perform emulations of large-scale networks (hundreds of nodes, more than one node can be set on one device of the testbeds) to verify the convergence properties of the distributed centrality computation;
  • Devise a strategy to optimize BGP parameters using Pop-Routing and testing it on the test-bed.

Team

The project is carried out in a cooperation between the DISI (University of Trento) and the DAIS (Ca’ Foscari University of Venice) departments. The team is composed by six people.

University of Trento Team:

University of Venice Team: