Towards robust, scalable, and fast Internet via Explicit Forwarding Engines (EFE)

Abstract

This paper argues that the scalability problems of the Internet could be solved, not only in the control plane, but also in the forwarding plane. To this end, an explicit forwarding scheme is presented. Our scheme alleviates the Internet routing scalability problem, and facilitates fast forwarding, enforcement of fine-grained ISP transit policies, and stateless multicast, while still retaining the robustness of hop-by-hop forwarding.