Dirty-slate approaches to scaling global internet routing

The Internet research community has in recent years taken a renewed interest in the long-standing global Internet routing scaling problem. Much of this research has taken the form of much-needed "clean-slate" research, where ideas are pursued unconstrained by the installed base. Our research group takes an opposite but complementary approach. We look for solutions that are economically motivated and therefore have a decent chance of actually being deployed. One such solution is Virtual Aggregation, an approach that exploits tunneling and aggregation to reduce the size of hardware routing tables (the FIB) easily by an order of magnitude. This work is being pursued in the IETF. More recently, we are working on adapting Virtual Aggregation to shrinking software routing tables (the RIB) as well. In this session, we will discuss the root causes of scaling problems in the Internet, review the history of scaling solutions, and present Virtual Aggregation in detail.