The goal of the project is the design and validation of a network architecture that provides 100 Mb/sec of connectivity to all 100 million American homes and small businesses. For both technical and financial reasons, extension of the current methods of network building are incapable of leading to a network that can provide 100 Mbps end-to-end between 100 M endpoints, with additional bandwidth between high demand sites such as Universities and National Labs.
More information is available from the 100x100 Project Website.
We argue for the refactoring of the IP control plane to provide direct expressibility and support for network-wide goals relating to all fundamental functionality: reachability, performance, reliability and security. This refactoring is motivated by trends in operational practice and in networking technology. We put forward a design that decomposes functionality into information dissemination and decision planes.
The decision plane is formed by lifting out of the routers all decision making logic currently found there and merging it with the current management plane where network-level objectives are specified. What is left on each router is a wafer-thin control plane focused on information dissemination and response to explicit instructions for configuring packet forwarding mechanisms. We discuss the consequences, advantages and challenges associated with this design.
As part of this work, we have developed abstractions and models that can represent the diverse set of routing designs seen in operational networks. These models provide a means to abstract and summarize a network's configuration that exposes the structure of the routing design and opens it up to direct analysis.
The code for anonymizing configuration files described in the paper Structure Preserving Anonymization of Router Configuration Data, is available.
Based on these models, we are creating a new alegbra that enables the static analysis of network properties that previously could only be experimentally determined. Examples include: a description of the set of packets a network will transport between two routers; the maximum load that might be placed on the routing processes running on the network's routers; and a metric to quanity how sensitive the network is to changes in topology and routing advertisements (which in turn may predict how prone the network is to "meltdown" failures where overloads cascade).
You will need Perl/Tk800.015 or newer installed on your machine. If you have not installed this package in the normal location, you will need to edit the appropriate lines at the top of the ad-hockey script to point to where the files are installed. For example:
#NOTE: this version of ad-hockey WILL NOT work with Perl/Tk400.200 # provide a path to perl/Tk if it's not installed in the default places use lib '/usr1/dmaltz/ns/Tk800.015'; use lib '/usr1/dmaltz/ns/Tk800.015/blib/arch'; use lib '/usr1/dmaltz/ns/Tk800.015/blib/lib';