Building Scalable Self-configuring Networks with SEIZE

IP networks today require massive effort to configure and manage. Ethernet is vastly simpler to manage, but does not scale beyond small local area networks. This paper describes an alternative network architecture called SEIZE that achieves the best of both worlds: The scalability of IP combined with the simplicity of Ethernet. SEIZE provides plugand-play functionality via flat addressing, while ensuring scalability and efficiency through shortest-path routing and hash-based location resolution. We implemented a prototype of SEIZE using the Click and XORP open-source routing platforms, and evaluated system performance on Emulab. Additionally, to evaluate performance on larger scales, we performed a simulation study driven by real-world traffic traces and network topologies. Our experiments show that SEIZE attains near-optimal path efficiency, while reducing control overhead and table size by roughly two orders of magnitude compared with Ethernet bridging.