A Network Management Tool For Inter-domain Policy Routing

In recent years, the number of organizations connected to thie Internet has grown, resulting in an increasingly diverse set of connected users. As a result, network managers have growing concerns about the security and control of network resources. This concern has led protocol engineers to design routing protocols, such as Inter-Domain Policy Routing (IDPR), that include policy restrictions. The introduction of these protocols present a number of new problems to network administrators as they may not be able to easily understand how the policies of different networks interact. A network manager would like to create policies that prevent unauthorized traffic, without impeding legitimate traffic: flows. In the presence of charging mechanisms, a manager may wish to use policy terms to assist in minimizing costs by avoiding the use of commercial networks whenever possible. In this paper we describe a route synthesis simulation tool (IISST) which we have implemented to examine some of these network management issues. We show how it is used to explore some hypothetical situations that a network administrator would face in managing policy routing. Mr. Meyer's work was supported by a CERFnet Graduate Research Fellowship and by the National Science Foundation. * Dr. Estrin's work was supported by the National Science Foundation. 5.3.1 NOMS '92 CH3134-419210000-0133 $3.00