AI-RON-E: Prophecy of One-Hop Source Routers

Despite the Internet\´s ability to recover from link failures, the process is laborious. Scalable one-hop source routing (SOSR) hastens the recovery, without complex routing algorithms, by routing around failures via indirect paths created using randomly-selected intermediate end-nodes. Even with only 39 intermediaries available, SOSR effectively masks out 89% of Internet core link failures. However, SOSR is restricted in 2 ways: (1) it employs only end-node intermediaries, thus traffic utilizing the indirect paths has to detour to the intermediaries at the Internet edges en-route to their destinations and (2) although the number of intermediaries can be scaled up to increase the indirect paths available, failure-masking rate is unlikely to improve much since it is difficult to find an indirect path that can mask a given failure, even if one exists, through random intermediary selection. To overcome these, we introduce the "AI-RON-E" prophecy-a loosely-federated infrastructure consisting of clients, "oracles" and Internet routers that are all One-hop Source Routing (OSR) aware. OSR routers can act as intermediaries to redirect traffic, avoiding the need to detour to the Internet edges, thereby shortening indirect paths formed. To increase the probability of finding a failure-masking intermediary from ineffective ones, AI-RON-E clients select intermediaries from partial views of the Internet obtained from the oracles and apply heuristics to filter out "bad" candidates from those views during the selection process. By hypothetically analyzing around 4500 link failures in 375 paths, we can conclusively foretell, even in the absence of the yet-to-be-built AI-RON-E infrastructure, that indeed AI-RON-E can be deployed at Internet-scale to seek out indirect paths faster and masks more link failures while offering shorter hop-count indirect paths at the expense of a small cache of path information.