Software Defined Internet Exchange

by Blog

Software Defined Internet Exchange

In today's digital era, where data is the lifeblood of every organization, the importance of a reliable and efficient internet connection cannot be overstated. As businesses increasingly rely on cloud-based applications and services, the demand for high-performance internet connectivity has skyrocketed. To meet this growing need, a revolutionary technology known as Software Defined Internet Exchange (SD-IX) has emerged as a game-changer in the networking world. In this blog post, we will delve into the concept of SD-IX, its benefits, and its potential to revolutionize how we connect to the internet.

Software Defined Internet Exchange, or SD-IX, allows organizations to dynamically connect to multiple Internet service providers (ISPs) through a centralized platform. Traditionally, internet traffic is exchanged through physical interconnections between ISPs, resulting in limited flexibility and control. SD-IX eliminates these limitations by virtualizing the interconnection process, enabling organizations to establish direct, secure, and scalable connections with multiple ISPs.

SD-IX Defined: Software Defined Internet Exchange, or SD-IX, is a cutting-edge technology that enables dynamic and automated interconnection between networks. Unlike traditional methods that rely on physical infrastructure, SD-IX leverages software-defined networking (SDN) principles to create virtualized interconnections, providing flexibility, scalability, and enhanced control.

Enhanced Performance: One of the prominent advantages of SD-IX is its ability to optimize network performance. By utilizing intelligent routing algorithms and traffic engineering techniques, SD-IX reduces latency, improves packet delivery, and enhances overall network efficiency. This translates into faster and more reliable connectivity for businesses and end-users alike.

Flexibility and Scalability: SD-IX offers unparalleled flexibility and scalability. With its virtualized nature, organizations can easily adjust their network connections, add or remove services, and scale their infrastructure as needed. This agility empowers businesses to adapt to changing demands, optimize their network resources, and accelerate their digital transformation initiatives.

Cost Efficiency: By leveraging SD-IX, organizations can significantly reduce their network costs. Traditional methods often require expensive physical interconnections and complex configurations. SD-IX eliminates the need for such costly infrastructure, replacing it with virtualized interconnections that can be provisioned and managed efficiently. This cost-saving aspect makes SD-IX an attractive option for businesses of all sizes.

Driving Innovation: SD-IX is poised to drive innovation in the networking landscape. Its ability to seamlessly connect disparate networks, whether cloud providers, content delivery networks, or internet service providers, opens up new possibilities for collaboration and integration. This interconnected ecosystem paves the way for novel services, improved user experiences, and accelerated digital innovation.

Enabling Edge Computing: As the demand for low-latency applications and services grows, SD-IX plays a crucial role in enabling edge computing. By bringing data centers closer to the edge, SD-IX reduces latency and enhances the performance of latency-sensitive applications. This empowers businesses to leverage emerging technologies like IoT, AI, and real-time analytics, unlocking new opportunities and use cases.

In conclusion, Software Defined Internet Exchange (SD-IX) represents a significant leap forward in the world of connectivity. With its virtualized interconnections, enhanced performance, flexibility, and cost efficiency, SD-IX is poised to reshape the networking landscape. As organizations strive to meet the ever-increasing demands of a digitally connected world, embracing SD-IX can unlock new realms of possibilities and propel them towards a future of seamless connectivity.

Matt Conran

Highlights: Software Defined Internet Exchange

Software-defined networks

A software-defined network (SDN) optimizes and simplifies network operations by closely tying applications and network services, whether real or virtual. By establishing a logically centralized network control point (typically an SDN controller), the control point orchestrates, mediates, and facilitates communication between applications that wish to interact with network elements and network elements that want to communicate information with those applications. The controller exposes and abstracts network functions and operations through modern, application-friendly, bidirectional programmatic interfaces.

As a result, software-defined, software-driven, and programmable networks have a rich and complex history and various challenges and solutions to those challenges. Because of the success of technologies that preceded them, software-defined, software-driven, and programmable networks are now possible.IP, BGP, MPLS, and Ethernet are the fundamental elements of most networks worldwide.

SDN and OpenFlow

Control and Data Plane Separation

SDN’s early proponents advocated separating a network device’s control and data planes as a potential advantage. Network operators benefit from this separation regarding centralized or semi-centralized programmatic control. As well as being economically advantageous, it can consolidate into a few places, usually a complex piece of software to configure and control, onto less expensive, so-called commodity hardware.

One of SDN’s most controversial tenets is separating control and data planes. It’s not a new concept, but the contemporary way of thinking puts a twist on it: how far should the control plane be from the data plane, how many instances are needed for resiliency and high availability, and if 100% of the control plane can be moved beyond a few inches are all intensely debated. There are many possible control planes, ranging from the simplest, the fully distributed, to the semi- and logically centralized, to the strictly centralized.

OpenFlow Matching

With OpenFlow, the forwarding path is determined more precisely (matching fields in the packet) than traditional routing protocols because the tables OpenFlow supports more than just the destination address. Using the source address to determine the next routing hop is similar to the granularity offered by PBR. In the same way that OpenFlow would do many years later, PBR permits network administrators to forward traffic based on “nontraditional” attributes, such as the source address of a packet. However, it took quite some time for PBR-forwarded traffic for network vendors to offer equivalent performance, and the final result was very vendor-specific.

The Role of SDN Solutions

Most existing SDN solutions are aimed at cellular core networks, enterprises, and the data center. However, at the WAN edge, SD-WAN and WAN SDN are leading a solid path, with many companies offering a BGP SDN solution augmenting natural Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) IP forwarding behavior with a controller architecture, optimizing both inbound and outbound Internet-bound traffic. So, how can we use these existing SDN mechanisms to enhance BGP for interdomain routing at Internet Exchange Points (IXP)?

The Role of IXPs

IXPs are location points where networks from multiple providers meet to exchange traffic with BGP routing. Each participating AS exchanges BGP routes by peering eBGP with a BGP route server, which directs traffic to another network ASes over a shared Layer 2 fabric. The shared Layer 2 fabric provides the data plane forwarding of packets. The actual BGP route server is the control plane to exchange routing information.

For additional pre-information, you may find the following posts helpful:

  1. Ansible Variables
  2. Open Networking
  3. Software Defined Perimeter Solutions
  4. Distributed Solutions
  5. Full Proxy



Software Defined Internet Exchange.

Key Software Defined Internet Exchange Discussion points:


  • Introduction to Software Defined Internet Exchange and where it can be used.

  • Discussion on IXP pain points and challenges.

  • What is the role of SDX, and how it works?

  • The role of OpenFlow with SDX.

Back to basics with the Internet Exchange.

An Internet exchange point (IXP) is a physical location through which Internet infrastructure companies such as Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and CDNs connect. These locations exist on the “edge” of different networks and allow network providers to share transit outside their network. IXPs will run BGP.

Also, it is essential to understand that Internet exchange point participants often require that the BGP NEXT_HOP specified in UPDATE messages be that of the peer’s IP address, as a matter of policy.

Benefits of SD-IX:

1. Enhanced Performance: SD-IX enables organizations to bypass the public internet and establish direct peering connections with ISPs. By reducing the number of network hops and congestion points, SD-IX improves network performance, resulting in lower latency and faster data transfer speeds.

2. Improved Reliability: SD-IX allows organizations to create redundant connections with multiple ISPs, ensuring high availability and resilience. In an ISP outage, traffic can be seamlessly rerouted through alternate connections, minimizing downtime and ensuring continuous connectivity.

3. Cost Efficiency: SD-IX eliminates the need for physical infrastructure and costly cross-connect fees by virtualizing the interconnection process. Organizations can leverage SD-IX to establish private interconnections with multiple ISPs at a fraction of the cost, significantly reducing network expenses.

4. Scalability and Flexibility: SD-IX allows organizations to scale their network connections on demand. Adding or removing connections can be complex and time-consuming with traditional interconnections. SD-IX simplifies this process by allowing organizations to provision and manage connections through a centralized portal, enabling rapid network expansion or modification.

5. Enhanced Security: SD-IX enables organizations to establish private, direct connections with ISPs, reducing exposure to potential security threats associated with the public internet. By bypassing the public internet, SD-IX provides a secure and controlled environment for data transfer, ensuring confidentiality and integrity.

Route Server

A route server provides an alternative to full eBGP peering between participating AS members, enabling network traffic engineering. It’s a control plane device and does not participate in data plane forwarding. There are currently around 300 IXPs worldwide. IXPs are good locations to deploy SDN of their simple architecture with flat networks.

There is no routing for forwarding, so there is a huge need for innovation. They usually consist of small teams, making innovation easy to introduce. Fear is one of the primary emotions that prohibit innovation, and one thing that creates fear is Loss of Service.

This is quite significant for IXP networks, as they may have over 5 Terabytes of traffic per second. IXPs are major connecting points, and a slight outage can have a significant ripple effect.

  • A key point. Internet Exchange Design

SDX, a software-defined internet exchange, is an SDN solution from the combined efforts of Princeton and UC Berkeley. It aims to address IXP pain points (listed below) by deploying additional SDN controllers and OpenFlow-enabled switches. It doesn’t try to replace the entire classical IXP architecture with something new but rather augments existing designs with a controller-based solution, enhancing IXP traffic engineering capabilities. However, the risks associated with open-source dependencies shouldn’t be ignored.

Software Defined Internet Exchange: IXP Pain Points

BGP is great for scalability and reducing complexity but severely limits how networks deliver traffic over the Internet. One tricky thing to do with BGP is good inbound TE. The issue is that IP routing is destination-based, so your neighbor decides where traffic enters the network. It’s not your decision.

The forwarding mechanism is based on the destination IP prefix. A device forwards all packets with the same destination address to the same next hop and the connected neighbor decides.

 The main pain points for IXP networks:

As already mentioned, routing is based on the destination IP prefix. BGP selects and exports routes for destination prefixes only. It doesn’t match other criteria in the packet header, such as source IP address or port number. Therefore, it cannot help with application steering, which would be helpful in IXP networks.

Secondly, you can only influence direct neighbors. There is no end-to-end control, and it’s hard to influence neighbors that you are not peering. Some BGP attributes don’t carry across multiple ASes; others may be recognized differently among vendors. We also use a lot of de-aggregation to TE. Everyone is doing this, which is why we have the problem of 540,000 prefixes on the Internet. De-aggregation and multihoming create lots of scalability challenges.

Finally, there is an indirect expression of policy. Local Preference (LP) and Multiple Exit Discriminator (MED) are ineffective mechanisms influencing traffic engineering. We should have better inbound and outbound TE capabilities. MED, AS Path, pretending, and Local Preference are widely used attributes for TE, but they are not the ultimate solution.

They are inflexible because they can only influence routing decisions based on destination prefixes. You can not do source IP or application type. They are very complex, involving intense configuration on multiple network devices. All these solutions involve influencing the remote party to decide how it enters your AS, and if the remote party does not apply them correctly, TE becomes unpredictable.

SDX: Software-Defined Internet Exchange

The SDX solution proposed by Laurent is a Software-Defined Internet Exchange. As previously mentioned, it consists of a controller-based architecture with OpenFlow 1.3-enabled physical switches. It aims to solve the pain points of BGP at the edge using SDN.

Transport SDN offers direct control over packet-processing rules that match on multiple header fields (not just destination prefixes) and perform various actions (not just forwarding), offering direct control over the data path. SDN enables the network to execute a broader range of decisions concerning end-to-end traffic delivery.

 How does it work?

What is OpenFlow? Is the IXP fabric replaced with OpenFlow-enabled switches? Now, network traffic engineering is based on granular OpenFlow rules. It’s more predictable as it does not rely on 3rd party neighbors to decide the entry. OpenFlow rules can be based on any packet header field, so it’s much more flexible than existing TE mechanisms. SDN-enabled data plane enables networks to have optimal WAN traffic with application steering capabilities. 

The existing route server has not been modified, but now we can push SDN rules into the fabric without requiring classical BGP tricks (local preference, MED, AS prepend). The solution matches the destination MAC address, not the destination IP prefix, and uses an ARP proxy to convert the IP prefixes to MAC addresses.

The participants define the forwarding policies, and the role of the controller is to compile the forwarding entries into the fabric. The SDX controller implementation has two main pipelines: a policy compiler based on Pyretic and a route server based on ExaBGP.

The policy compiler accepts input policies (custom route advertisements) written in Pyretic from individual participants and BGP routes from the route server. This produces forwarding rules that implement the policies.

The SDX controller combines the policies from multiple member ASes into one policy for the physical switch implementation. The controller is like an optimized compiler, compiling down the policy and optimizing the code in the forwarding by using a virtual next hop. There are other potential design alternatives to SDX, such as BGP FlowSpec. But in this case, BGP FlowSpec would have to be supported by all participating member AS edge devices.

As the demand for high-performance and reliable internet connectivity continues to grow, SD-IX is poised to play a pivotal role in shaping the future of networking. By virtualizing the interconnection process and providing organizations with unprecedented control and flexibility over their network connections, SD-IX empowers businesses to optimize their network performance, enhance security, and reduce costs. With its ability to scale on-demand and seamlessly reroute traffic, SD-IX is well-suited for the evolving needs of cloud-based applications, IoT devices, and emerging technologies such as edge computing.

Software Defined Internet Exchange represents a paradigm shift in how organizations connect to the Internet. By virtualizing the interconnection process and providing enhanced performance, reliability, cost efficiency, scalability, and security, SD-IX offers a compelling solution for businesses seeking to optimize their network infrastructure. As the digital landscape continues to evolve, SD-IX is set to revolutionize the way we connect to the internet, enabling organizations to stay ahead of the curve and unlock new possibilities in the digital era.

 

Summary: Software Defined Internet Exchange

In today’s fast-paced digital world, seamless connectivity is necessary for businesses and individuals. As technology advances, traditional Internet exchange models face scalability, flexibility, and cost-effectiveness limitations. However, a groundbreaking solution has emerged – software-defined internet exchange (SD-IX). In this blog post, we will delve into the world of SD-IX, exploring its benefits, functionalities, and potential to revolutionize how we connect online.

Understanding SD-IX

SD-IX, at its core, is a virtualized network infrastructure that enables the dynamic and efficient exchange of internet traffic between multiple parties. Unlike traditional physical exchange points, SD-IX leverages software-defined networking (SDN) principles to provide a more agile and scalable solution. By separating the control and data planes, SD-IX empowers organizations to manage their network traffic with enhanced flexibility and control.

The Benefits of SD-IX

Enhanced Performance and Latency Reduction

SD-IX brings the exchange points closer to end-users, reducing the distance data travels. This proximity results in lower latency and improved network performance, enabling faster application response times and better user experience.

Scalability and Agility

Traditional exchange models often struggle to keep up with the ever-increasing demands for bandwidth and connectivity. SD-IX addresses this challenge by providing a scalable architecture that can adapt to changing network requirements. Organizations can easily add or remove connections, adjust bandwidth, and optimize network resources on-demand, all through a centralized interface.

Cost-Effectiveness

With SD-IX, organizations can avoid the costly investments in building and maintaining physical infrastructure. By leveraging virtualized network components, businesses can save costs while benefiting from enhanced connectivity and performance.

Use Cases and Applications

Multi-Cloud Connectivity

SD-IX facilitates seamless connectivity between multiple cloud environments, allowing organizations to distribute workloads and resources efficiently. By leveraging SD-IX, businesses can build a robust and resilient multi-cloud architecture, ensuring high availability and optimized data transfer between cloud platforms.

Hybrid Network Integration

For enterprises with a mix of on-premises infrastructure and cloud services, SD-IX serves as a bridge, seamlessly integrating these environments. SD-IX enables secure and efficient communication between different network domains, empowering organizations to leverage the advantages of both on-premises and cloud-based resources.

Conclusion:

In conclusion, software-defined Internet exchange (SD-IX) presents a transformative solution to the challenges faced by traditional exchange models. With its enhanced performance, scalability, and cost-effectiveness, SD-IX is poised to revolutionize how we connect and exchange data in the digital age. As businesses continue to embrace the power of SD-IX, we can expect a new era of connectivity that empowers innovation, collaboration, and seamless digital experiences.

Routing Control Platform

BGP-based Routing Control Platform (RCP)

by Blog

Routing Control Platfrom

In today's fast-paced digital world, efficient network management is crucial for businesses and organizations. One technology that has revolutionized routing and network control is the Routing Control Platform (RCP). In this blog post, we will delve into the world of RCPs, exploring their features, benefits, and their potential impact on network infrastructure.

A Routing Control Platform is a software-based solution that offers centralized control and management of network routing. It acts as the brain behind the routing decisions, providing a unified platform for configuring, monitoring, and optimizing routing policies. By abstracting the underlying network infrastructure, RCPs bring simplicity and agility to network management.

1. Policy-based Routing: RCPs allow administrators to define routing policies based on various parameters such as network conditions, traffic patterns, and security requirements. This granular control enables efficient traffic engineering and enhances network performance.

2. Centralized Management: With RCPs, network administrators gain a centralized view and control of routing across multiple network devices. This simplifies configuration management, reduces complexity, and streamlines operations.

3. Dynamic Routing Adaptability: RCPs enable dynamic routing adaptability, which means they can automatically adjust routing decisions based on real-time network conditions. This ensures optimal traffic routing and improves network resiliency.

1. Enhanced Network Performance: RCPs optimize routing decisions, leading to improved network performance, reduced latency, and increased throughput. This translates into better user experiences and improved productivity.

2. Increased Flexibility: With RCPs, network administrators can easily adapt routing policies to changing business needs. This flexibility allows for rapid deployment of new services, efficient traffic engineering, and seamless integration with emerging technologies.

3. Simplified Network Management: RCPs provide a unified platform for managing and controlling routing across diverse network devices. This simplifies network management, reduces operational overhead, and enhances scalability.

1. Scalability: Ensure that the RCP can handle the scale of your network, supporting a large number of devices and routing policies without compromising performance.

2. Integration Capabilities: Look for RCPs that seamlessly integrate with your existing network infrastructure, including routers, switches, and SDN controllers. This ensures a smooth transition and minimizes disruption.

3. Security: Verify that the RCP offers robust security features, including authentication, access control, and encryption. Network security should be a top priority when implementing an RCP.

Conclusion: Routing Control Platforms have emerged as a game-changer in network management, offering centralized control, flexibility, and improved performance. By leveraging the power of RCPs, organizations can optimize their network infrastructure, adapt to changing demands, and stay ahead in the digital era.

Mattt Conran

Highlights: Routing Control Platfrom

Centralized Forwarding Solution

The Routing Control Platform (RCP) is a centralized forwarding solution, similar to BGP SDN that enables the collection of a network topology map, running an algorithm, and selecting the preferred BGP route for each router in an Autonomous System (AS). It does this by peering both the IGP platform and iBGP to neighboring routers and communicating the preferred routes using unmodified iBGP.

It acts similarly to an enhanced route reflector and does not sit in the data path. It is a control plane device, separate from the IP forwarding plane. The RCP protocol exhibits the accuracy of a full mesh iBGP design and scalability enhancements of route reflection without sacrificing route selection correctness.

Hot Potato Routing

A potential issue with route reflection is that AS exit best path selection (hot potato routing) is performed by route reflectors from their IGP reference point, which in turn gets propagated to all RR clients scattered throughout the network. As a result, the best path selected may not be optimal for many RR clients as it depends on where the RR client is logically placed in the network.

You may also encounter MED-induced route oscillations. The Routing Control Platform aims to solve this problem.

Before you proceed, you may find the following blog BGP of interest:

  1. What is BGP protocol in networking
  2. Full Proxy
  3. What Does SDN Mean
  4. DNS Reflection Attack
  5. Segment Routing



Routing Control.

Key Routing Control Platform Discussion Points:


  • Introduction to Routing Control Platform and how it can be used.

  • Discussion on BGP Route Reflectors (RR) and BGP Confederations.

  • Discussion on an IGP platform and how RCP works.

  • Details on extracting the topology.

Back to Basics Routing Control Platform

Routing Foundations

A network carries traffic where traffic flows from a start node to an end node; generally, we refer to the start node as the source node and the end node as the destination node. We must pick a path or route from the source node to the destination node. A route can be set up manually; such a route is static. Or we can have a dynamic routing protocol, such as an IGP or EGP.

With dynamic routing protocols, we have to use a routing algorithm. The role of the routing algorithm is to determine a route. Each routing algorithm will have different ways of choosing a path. Finally, a network can be expressed as a graph by mapping each node to a unique vertex in the graph, where links between network nodes are represented by edges connecting the corresponding vertices. Each edge can carry one or more weights; such weights may depict cost, delay, bandwidth, and so on. Many of these methods are now enhanced with an IGP platform and different types of routing control.

A key point: Replacing iBGP with the OpenFlow protocol

There are proposed enhancements to the Routing Control Platform by replacing iBGP with the OpenFlow protocol, providing additional capabilities beyond next-hop forwarding. This may be useful for a BGP-free edge core and will be addressed later. The following discusses the original Routing Control Platform proposed by Princeton University and AT&T Labs-Research.

Benefits of Routing Control Platforms:

1. Enhanced Network Performance:

RCPs offer granular control over routing decisions, allowing network administrators to optimize traffic flow and minimize latency. By intelligently distributing traffic across multiple paths, RCPs ensure that network resources are utilized efficiently, improving network performance and end-user experience.

2. Improved Network Resilience:

RCPs enable organizations to build highly resilient networks by implementing diverse routing paths. In the event of a network failure or congestion, RCPs automatically reroute traffic to alternative paths, ensuring uninterrupted connectivity and minimizing downtime.

3. Increased Security:

With the rise in cyber threats, organizations’ network security has become a top priority. RCPs provide advanced security features, such as traffic filtering and access control, to protect against malicious activities. By centralizing routing control, RCPs enable network administrators to implement robust security policies and mitigate potential risks.

4. Scalability and Flexibility:

As businesses grow and networks expand, scaling and adapting becomes crucial. RCPs offer scalability by allowing organizations to add or remove network devices seamlessly. Additionally, RCPs provide flexibility in managing routing protocols, allowing administrators to easily configure and customize routing policies based on specific business requirements.

Use Cases of Routing Control Platforms:

1. Internet Service Providers (ISPs):

ISPs can leverage RCPs to optimize network performance, enhance customer experience, and manage bandwidth effectively. RCPs allow ISPs to distribute traffic intelligently across their networks, ensuring optimal infrastructure utilization and reducing congestion.

2. Data Centers:

In data center environments, where high availability and low latency are critical, RCPs play a vital role in achieving efficient routing. By implementing RCPs, data centers can distribute traffic across multiple paths, balancing the load and minimizing response times.

3. Enterprise Networks:

Large enterprises with complex network infrastructures can benefit from RCPs to gain control over routing decisions. RCPs provide centralized management capabilities, simplifying the configuration and monitoring of routing policies across the entire network.

iBGP and eBGP

Routers within an AS exchange routes to external destinations using internal BGP (iBGP), and routers peer externally to their AS using external BGP (eBGP). All BGP speakers within a single AS must be fully meshed to propagate external destinations. For loop prevention, the original BGP design states reachability information learned from an iBGP router can not be forwarded to another iBGP router inside the full mesh. eBGP designs use AS-PATH for loop prevention. All routing protocols, not just BGP, require some mechanism to prevent loops.

With iBGP, the maximum number of iBGP hops an update can traverse is 1.

Route-reflection (RR) and confederations

To combat the scalability concerns with an iBGP full mesh design, in 1996, several alternatives, such as route reflection and confederations, were proposed. Both of these enable hierarchies within the topology. However, route reflection has drawbacks, which may result in path diversity and network performance side effects. There is a trade-off between routing correctness and scalability. With iBGP full mesh designs, if one BGP router fails, it will have a limited impact. An update travels only one i-BGP hop. However, if a route reflector fails, it has an extensive network impact. All iBGP peers peering with the route reflector are affected. 

An update message may traverse multiple route reflectors with a route reflection design before reaching the desired i-BGP router. This may have adverse effects, such as prolonged routing convergence. One of route reflection’s most significant adverse effects is reduced path diversity. A high path diversity can increase resilience, while low path diversity will decrease resilience. Since a route reflector only passes its best route, all clients peering with that route reflector use the same path for that given destination.

Lab on BGP Route-Reflection

The following lab guide will examine the BGP RR if you don’t want a full mesh of iBGP speakers. Route reflectors (RR) are one method of eliminating the full mesh of IBGP peers in your network. The other method is BGP confederations.

The route reflector allows all IBGP speakers within your autonomous network to learn about the available routes without introducing loops. 

The route reflector can have three types of peerings:

    • EBGP neighbor
    • IBGP client neighbor
    • IBGP non-client neighbor

In the example below, we have 3 IBGP routers. With standard IBGP rules, when R2 receives a route from R1, it will not be forwarded to R3 (IBGP split horizon). We will configure R2 as the route reflector to get around this.

BGP Route Reflection
Diagram: BGP Route Reflection

Proper route reflector placement and design can eliminate some of these drawbacks. We now have path diversity mechanisms such as the BGP ADD Path capability and parallel peerings for better route reflection design. These were not available during the original RCP proposal.

Routing Control Platform (RCP)

The RCP consists of several components: 1) Route Control Server ( RCS), 2) BGP Engine, and 3) IGP platform viewer. It is similar to the newer BGP SDN platform proposed by Petr Lapukhov but has an additional IGP platform viewer function. Petr’s BGP SDN solution proposes a single Layer 3 protocol with BGP – a pure Layer 3 data center.

The RCP platform has two types of peerings: IGP and iBGP. It obtains IGP information by peering with IGP and learns BGP routes with iBGP. The Route Control Server component then analyzes the IGP and BGP viewer information to compute the best path and send it back via iBGP. Notice how the IGP Viewer only needs one peering into each partition in the diagram below.

Routing Control Platform
Diagram: Routing Control Platform

Since the link-state protocol uses reliable LSA flooding, the IGP viewer has an up-to-date topology view. To keep the IGP viewer out of the data plane, higher costs are configured on the links to the controller. As discussed, the BGP engine creates iBGP sessions for other directly reachable speakers or via the IGP.

By combining these elements, the RCS has full BGP and IGP topology information and can make routing decisions for routers in a particular partition. The RCP must have complete visibility. Otherwise, it could assign routes that create black holes, forwarding loops, or other issues preventing packets from reaching their destinations.

Centralized controller: Extract the topology

RPC uses a centralized controller to extract the topology and make routing decisions. These decisions are then pushed to the data plane nodes to forward data packets. It aims to offer the correctness of full-mesh iBGP designs and the scalability of route reflector designs. It uses iBGP sessions to peer with BGP speakers, learn topology information, and send routing decisions for destination prefixes.

As previously discussed, a route reflector design only sends its best path to clients, which limits path diversity. However, the RCP platform overcomes this route reflector limitation and sends each router a route it would have selected in an iBGP full mesh design.

Routing Control Platforms empower organizations to take control of their network routing, leading to enhanced performance, improved resilience, and increased security. By leveraging RCPs, businesses can optimize their network infrastructure, ensuring smooth operations and a seamless user experience. As the demand for robust and flexible networks grows, Routing Control Platforms will play an increasingly vital role in effectively managing and controlling network traffic.

 

Summary: Routing Control Platfrom

Routing control platforms play a crucial role in managing and optimizing network infrastructures. From enhancing network performance to ensuring efficient traffic routing, these platforms have become indispensable in the digital era. In this blog post, we explored the world of routing control platforms, their functionalities, benefits, and how they empower network management.

Understanding Routing Control Platforms

Routing control platforms are sophisticated software solutions designed to control and manage network traffic routing. They provide network administrators with comprehensive visibility and control over the flow of data packets within a network. By leveraging advanced algorithms and protocols, these platforms enable efficient decision-making regarding packet routing, ensuring optimal performance and reliability.

Key Features and Functionalities

Routing control platforms offer many features and functionalities that empower network management. These include:

1. Centralized Traffic Control: Routing control platforms provide a centralized interface for monitoring and controlling network traffic. Administrators can define routing policies, prioritize traffic, and adjust routing paths based on real-time conditions.

2. Traffic Engineering: With advanced traffic engineering capabilities, these platforms enable administrators to optimize network paths and distribute traffic evenly across multiple links. This ensures efficient resource utilization and minimizes congestion.

3. Security and Policy Enforcement: Routing control platforms offer robust security mechanisms to protect networks from unauthorized access and potential threats. They enforce policies, such as access control lists and firewall rules, to safeguard sensitive data and maintain network integrity.

Benefits of Routing Control Platforms

Implementing a routing control platform brings several benefits to network management:

1. Enhanced Performance: Routing control platforms improve overall network performance by efficiently managing traffic routing and optimizing network paths, reducing latency and packet loss.

2. Increased Reliability: These platforms enable administrators to implement redundancy and failover mechanisms, ensuring uninterrupted network connectivity and minimizing downtime.

3. Flexibility and Scalability: Routing control platforms provide the flexibility to adapt to changing network requirements and scale as the network grows. They support dynamic routing protocols and can accommodate new network elements seamlessly.

Conclusion:

Routing control platforms have revolutionized network management by providing administrators with powerful tools to optimize traffic routing and enhance network performance. These platforms empower organizations to build robust and efficient networks, from centralized traffic control to advanced traffic engineering capabilities. By harnessing the benefits of routing control platforms, network administrators can unlock the true potential of their infrastructures and deliver a seamless user experience.