Date Available

12-8-2012

Year of Publication

2012

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Document Type

Doctoral Dissertation

College

Engineering

Department/School/Program

Computer Science

First Advisor

Dr. Kenneth Calvert

Abstract

This dissertation presents measures of efficiency and locality for Internet addressing schemes.

Historically speaking, many issues, faced by the Internet, have been solved just in time, to make the Internet just work~\cite{justWork}. Consensus, however, has been reached that today's Internet routing and addressing system is facing serious scaling problems: multi-homing which causes finer granularity of routing policies and finer control to realize various traffic engineering requirements, an increased demand for provider-independent prefix allocations which injects unaggregatable prefixes into the Default Free Zone (DFZ) routing table, and ever-increasing Internet user population and mobile edge devices. As a result, the DFZ routing table is again growing at an exponential rate.

Hierarchical, topology-based addressing has long been considered crucial to routing and forwarding scalability. Recently, however, a number of research efforts are considering alternatives to this traditional approach. With the goal of informing such research, we investigated the efficiency of address assignment in the existing (IPv4) Internet. In particular, we ask the question: ``how can we measure the locality of an address scheme given an input AS-level graph?''

To do so, we first define a notion of efficiency or locality based on the average number of bit-hops required to advertize all prefixes in the Internet. In order to quantify how far from ``optimal" the current Internet is, we assign prefixes to ASes ``from scratch" in a manner that preserves observed semantics, using three increasingly strict definitions of equivalence.

Next we propose another metric that in some sense quantifies the ``efficiency" of the labeling and is independent of forwarding/routing mechanisms. We validate the effectiveness of the metric by applying it to a series of address schemes with increasing randomness given an input AS-level graph. After that we apply the metric to the current Internet address scheme across years and compare the results with those of compact routing schemes.

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