A resilient redundant routing framework for future internet architecture

Abstract

The unending expansion of Internet-enabled services drives demand for higher speeds and more stringent reliability capabilities in the commercial Internet. Network carriers, driven by these customer demands, increasingly acquire and deploy ever larger routers with an ever growing feature set. The software however, is not currently structured adequately to preserve Non-Stop Operation and is sometimes deployed in non-redundant software configurations.

In this dissertation, we look at current Routing Frameworks and address the growing reliability concerns of Future Internet Architectures. We propose and implement a new distributed architecture for next generation core routers by implementing N-Modular Redundancy for Control Plane Processes. We use a distributed key-value data store as a substrate for High Availability (HA) operation and synchronization with different consistency requirements. A new platform is proposed, with many characteristics similar to Software Defined Network, on which the framework is deployed.

Our work looks at the feasibility of Non-Stop Routing System Design, where a router can continue to process both control and data messages, even with multiple concurrent software and hardware failures. A thorough discussion on the framework, components, and capabilities is given, and an estimation of overhead, fault recovery and responsiveness is presented. We argue that even though our work is focused in the context of routing, it also applies to any use-case where Non-Stop Real-Time response is required.