Routing Design in Operational Networks: A Look from the Inside

In any IP network, routing protocols provide the intelligence that takes a collection of physical links and transforms them into a network that enables packets to travel from one host to another. Though routing design is arguably the single most important design task for large IP networks, there has been very little systematic investigation into how routing protocols are actually used in production networks to implement the goals of network architects. We have developed a methodology for reverse engineering a coherent global view of a network’s routing design from the static analysis of dumps of the local configuration state of each router. Starting with a set of 8,035 configuration files, we have applied this method to 31 production networks. In this paper we present a detailed examination of how routing protocols are used in operational networks. In particular, the results show the conventional model of “interior” and “exterior” gateway protocols is insufficient to describe the diverse set of mechanisms used by architects. We provide examples of the more unusual designs and examine their trade-offs. We discuss the strengths and weaknesses of our methodology, and argue that it opens paths towards new understandings of network behavior and design.