Using BGP-4 to migrate to a future internet

Abstract

The Internet has evolved to become one of the most critical communication infrastructures in the planet. And yet, some of its underlying concepts and protocols do not provide the adequate level of reliability for such an essential role in global communications. The inter-domain routing protocol of the Internet, Border Gateway Protocol (BGP-4), is being used with varying degree of success for tasks for which it was not originally designed, such as Traffic Engineering. This paper presents a rationalised view of the different functions implemented by routing nowadays and proposes the use of Autonomous System Compartments. The Autonomous System (AS) Compartments imply a new routing hierarchy over the traditional BGP-4 routing, where specific functionalities like Traffic Engineering can be better controlled and additional routing incentives can be introduced. The FP-7 project 4WARD is working on new communication paradigms for the Future Internet and AS Compartments are a choice to contain the Generic Path (GP) concept developed by it. In order to provide inter-domain capabilities and a migration tool to connect GP islands, the multiprotocol mechanism of the BGP-4 routing is used. This paper presents the AS Compartment concept and the integration of Generic Paths in it, as well as an implementation of the GP-BGP concept for the J-Sim simulator (JSIM) environment. © 2011 ICST Institute for Computer Science, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering.