Advances in Inter-domain Networking

This dissertation describes advances made in support of two types of inter-domain network services: Scheduled Dynamic Circuit Service (SDCS) and IP datagram service. For SDCS, we developed a new reliable multicast transport protocol for distributing data to multiple receivers over virtual circuits. This protocol is called Virtual Circuit Multicast Transport Protocol (VCMTP). One of the key features of the VCMTP design is the ability to tradeoff file-transfer throughput for fast receivers with robustness (the percentage of successfully delivered files) for slow receivers using a configurable parameter called retransmission timeout factor. For a traffic load of 0.4, and a multicast group with 30 receivers, robustness increased significantly from 81.4 to 97.5\% when the retransmission timeout factor was increased from 10 to 50. The corresponding drop in average throughput for fast receivers was small (86.9 to 85.8 Mbps). For IP-routed service, we designed and evaluated a clean-slate inter-domain routing and addressing architecture called Less-Is-More Architecture (LIMA), and showed how the solution can be adopted in today's IPv6 Internet. Noting that the current practices of using Provider-Independent (PI) addressing and propagating stub Provider-Aggregatable (PA) address sub-blocks to the default-free zone routers undermine the advantages of hierarchical addressing, LIMA proposes solutions that would allow multihomed stubs to use multiaddressing by obtaining PA address blocks, one from each of its providers. Solutions for address renumbering when stubs change providers, and for handling failures of access links without loss of reachability are proposed. An analysis of the current Internet BGP RIBs showed that the current global routing table size of 450K prefix entries would be reduced to about 24K entries if this solution was adopted by all stubs.