HSR: Using hybrid source routing to achieve scalable Internet routing

Nowadays, due to the rapid growing popularity of Internet, the global routing system suffers from great scalability problem. Many solutions are proposed to solve the problem, including FIB aggregation, core/edge separation solutions, et al. The limitation of these existing solutions is that they all make the assumption that all addresses in the Internet must be globally visible and these routing information must be spread worldwide. We propose to make some network prefixes globally invisible and eliminate the routing information of these prefixes from the global routing system to further improve the scalability of the Internet. Our solution distinguishes content provider networks (containing content providers) from content consumer networks (containing only content consumers) and removes the routing information of content consumer networks. In order to cope with the communication between content consumer networks and content provider networks, we propose HSR (Hybrid Source Routing), in which source routing is used to assist network-based routing to achieve end-to-end reachability. We carry out performance evaluation by simulation, and experimental results show that if only top 1 million websites are globally visible, the visible ASes, prefixes in forwarding table and received updates can be reduced to 40%, 12% and 10%.