Morpheus: Enabling Flexible Interdomain Routing Policies

Abstract:

Giving ISPs more fine-grain control over interdomain routing policies
would help them better manage their networks and offer value-added
services to their customers. Unfortunately, the current BGP
route-selection process imposes inherent restrictions on the policies
an ISP can express, making many useful policies infeasible. In this
paper, we present Morpheus, a routing control platform
that enables a single ISP to realize a much
broader range of routing policies without changing the underlying
routers or coordinating with other domains. Inspired by multi-criteria
decision analysis (MCDA),
the design of the Morpheus server allows network operators to easily
define new policy objectives, make flexible trade-offs between the
objectives, and realize customer-specific policies.
We present the design, implementation, and evaluation of Morpheus as
an extension to the XORP software router. Our experiments show that
Morpheus can support a large number of policies while handling the
high rate of BGP update messages seen in large ISPs.