Development, Implementation, and Simulation of a Source Policy Route Discovery Protocol

Publication Date

8-2003

Type of Culminating Activity

Thesis

Degree Title

Master of Science in Computer Science

Department

Computer Science

Supervisory Committee Chair

Jyh-haw Yeh

Abstract

The Internet is composed of many Autonomous Systems (ASs) under different authorities with possible conflicts of interest. Each AS has its own source or transit policies to regulate network traffic to or through its domain. Communication packets among ASs may be silently dropped by any AS in the route because the communication violates its policies. Policy routing is a research field to resolve the packet-dropping problem. Currently, Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) is the most dominant protocol in this field. It allows each AS to apply its own policies to select and advertise routes to other ASs. These policy-fulfilled route advertisements are propagated throughout the whole Internet so that a certain degree of policy routing can be achieved. However, BGP is a hop-by-hop distance-vector protocol in which each router only advertises one route per destination to its neighbors. As a result, a source AS may not be capable of establishing a connection to another AS due to lack of policy routes in hand, though such routes may physically exist. With respect to this deficiency, this thesis proposes a protocol, Source Policy Route Discovery Protocol, to supplement BGP. A simulation program was written and some experiments were done. According to the experiments, the proposed protocol is suitable for improving the reliability and performance of BGP.

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