Principal Investigator Hari Balakrishnan
Project Website http://nms.csail.mit.edu/routing/
Tools and Techniques for Fault Detection and Traffic Engineering: The state-of-the-art for router configuration typically involves logging configuration changes and rolling back to a previous version when a problem arises. The lack of a formal reasoning framework means that router configuration is time-consuming and ad hoc. We propose a set of rules, called the routing logic, which can be used to determine whether a routing protocol satisfies various properties. Network operators need tools based on systematic fault detection techniques to ensure that BGP's operational behavior is consistent with the intended behavior (i.e., that the network is operating ``correctly''). We are designing a verification tool based on a new reasoning framework that helps operators and protocol designers reason about high-level properties of routing.
Understanding Routing Dynamics: We attempt to develop better intuition for why network failures occur by looking at BGP updates and correlating route withdrawals with end-to-end behavior that can be observed with tools such as traceroute. We have also examined BGP routing data to build evidence for the existence of routing misconfiguration.
New Routing Protocols and Architectures: The limitations in today's routing system arise in large part from the fully distributed path-selection computation that the IP routers must perform. We are working on a system called the Routing Control Platform (RCP), a system that performs route selection on behalf of routers, whose task then is simply to forward packets.