Towards a New Internet Routing Architecture: Arguments for Separating Edges from Transit Core

In recent years, the size and dynamics of the global routing table have increased rapidly along with an increase in the number of edge networks. The relation between edge network quantity and routing table size/dynamics reveals a major limitation in the current architecture; there is a conflict between provider-based address aggregation and edge networks’ need for multihoming. Two basic directions towards resolving this conflict have surfaced in the networking community. The first direction, which we dub separation, calls for separating edge networks from the transit core, and engineering a control and management layer in between. The other direction, which we dub elimination, calls for edge networks to adopt multiple provider-assigned addresses to enable provider-based address aggregation. In this paper, we argue that separation is a more promising approach to scaling the global routing system than elimination, and can potentially be leveraged to bring other architectural improvements to today’s Internet that an elimination approach cannot.