M-PolKA: Multipath Polynomial Key-Based Source Routing for Reliable Communications

• Published in: IEEE eTransactions on network and service management 2022-09, Vol.19 (3), p.2639-2651
• Main Authors: Guimaraes, Rafael S., Dominicini, Cristina, Martinez, Victor M. G., Xavier, Bruno M., Mafioletti, Diego R., Locateli, Ana C., Villaca, Rodolfo, Martinello, Magnos, Ribeiro, Moises R. N.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: chinese remainder theorem; Communications traffic; Hardware; Mathematical analysis; multipath; Network topologies; Polynomials; Quality of service; Reliability; residue number system; Residue number systems; Routing; Scalability; SDN; Source routing; Switches; Topology; Traffic engineering
• ISSN: 1932-4537; 1932-4537
• DOI: 10.1109/TNSM.2022.3160875

Innovative traffic engineering functions and services require disrupting routing and forwarding mechanisms to be performed with low overhead over complex network topologies. Source routing (SR) is a prominent alternative to table-based routing for providing the needed expressiveness and agility by reducing the number of network states. This work proposes the M-PolKA, a topology-agnostic multipath source routing scheme and orchestration architecture for reliable communications, which explores special properties from the Residue Number System (RNS) polynomial arithmetic. A P4-based proof-of-concept is experimentally demonstrated using emulated and hardware prototypes. Also, use cases for revealing M-PolKA's functionalities are tested in different scenarios in order to address problems, such as communication reliability improvement, agile path migration and fast failure reaction. Finally, low overhead for extra functionalities is observed when RNS-based SR is compared to traditional routing approaches.