Tim Griffin
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ROUTING POLICY LANGUAGES MUST BE DESIGNED AND STANDARDIZED
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The following scenario MUST take place within the next few years:
The Interdomain routing system will enter a state of non-convergence
that is so disruptive as to effectively bring down large portions of
the Internet. The problem will be due to unforeseen global interactions of
locally defined routing policies. Furthermore, no one ISP will have enough
knowledge to identify and debug the problem. It will take nearly a week
to fix and cost the world economy billions of dollars. The world press will
learn that the internet engineering community had known about this lurking
problem all along....
So, we better have a solution! I'll argue the only way to effectively
solve this problem is to define routing policy languages that are
guaranteed to be globally sane, no matter the what local policies
are defined. Then these languages need to be standardized and
BGP speakers MUST be forced to use them.
This raises many interesting research problems. Is it possible to
design such languages? How can we find the right balance between
local policy expressiveness and global sanity? What exactly do we mean
by "autonomy" of routing policy? Do we need additional protocols
to enforce global sanity conditions? How can we enforce compliance of
policy language usage?