Scalable simulation of complex network routing policies

Abstract

Modern routing protocols for the internet implement complex policies that take more into account than just path length. However, current routing protocol simulators are limited to either working with hard-coded policies or working on small networks (1000 nodes or less). It is currently not possible to ask questions about how the routing tables will change on all of the autonomous systems (e.g., AT&T, Sprint, etc.) in the internet, given a change in the routing protocol. This paper presents a routing policy simulation framework that enables such simulations to be done on resources that are readily available to researchers, such as a small set of typical desktops. We base the policy simulation framework on the Routing Algebra Meta-Language (RAML), which is a formal framework for specifying routing policies. Our theoretical contributions include proving that the signatures and the meet operation induced by the preference operator in RAML define a semilattice and that routing policy simulation frameworks are analogous to dataflow analysis frameworks.The main problem we address is that direct implementation of routing policy simulation has scaling issues due to the O(n 2 ) memory requirements for routing tables. However, due to properties of routing algebras specified in RAML, we are able to segment the simulation problem into multiple runs that propagate route information for subsets of the network on each run. This strategy enables us to perform a simulation that does not exceed system memory on typical desktops and enables the 43 minute, parallel simulation of a real network topology (33k nodes) and an approximation of the common BGP protocol.

Final Report for Colorado State University

“…As part of the OpenAnalysis project, we developed a Data-Flow Analysis Generator tool (DFAGen), which enables analysis writers to generate analyses for separable and nonseparable data-flow analyses that are pointer, aggregate, and side-effect cognizant from a specification that assumes only scalars [12,13]. By hiding the compiler-specific details behind predefined set definitions, the analysis specifications for the DFAGen tool are typically less than ten lines long and similar to those in standard compiler textbooks.…”

“…We developed a routing policy simulation framework called MR.Sim that enables such simulations to be done on resources that are readily available to researchers, such as a small set of typical desktops [13,2]. We base the policy simulation framework on the Routing Algebra Meta-Language (RAML), which is a formal framework for specifying routing policies.…”

“…a public domain suite of software for program analysis (i.e. OpenAnalysis, UseOA-ROSE, UseOA-Open64) that is currently being used in software tools being developed at Argonne, 2. the development of linearity analysis for use in improving the performance of the adjoint code generated by automatic differentiation tools, 3. a domain-specific programming language based on set building notation for specifying dataflow analyses at a high-level of abstraction with a compiler that generates the full data-flow analysis implementation, 4. theory and a prototype implementation for performing data-flow program analysis of MPI programs, 5. and the development of a parallel, network protocol simulation framework (which turns out to be similar to data-flow analysis frameworks) in collaboration with networking researchers at CSU.The above research contributions have resulted in 10 conference and workshop publications [17,16,4,14,6,8,9,12,13,5], 2 journal papers [19,11], a master's thesis [10], a conference paper still in submission [2], and a journal paper under preparation [15]. At Colorado State University, this project supported one graduate student for four years, provided some summer salary for the PI, and provided some hourly support for an undergraduate research assistant.…”

“…The above research contributions have resulted in 10 conference and workshop publications [17,16,4,14,6,8,9,12,13,5], 2 journal papers [19,11], a master's thesis [10], a conference paper still in submission [2], and a journal paper under preparation [15]. At Colorado State University, this project supported one graduate student for four years, provided some summer salary for the PI, and provided some hourly support for an undergraduate research assistant.…”