Scalable VPN routing via relaying

Enterprise customers are increasingly adopting MPLS (Multiprotocol Label Switching) VPN (Virtual Private Network) service that offers direct any-to-any reachability among the customer sites via a provider network. Unfortunately this direct reachability model makes the service provider's routing tables grow very large as the number of VPNs and the number of routes per customer increase. As a result, router memory in the provider's network has become a key bottleneck in provisioning new customers. This paper proposes Relaying, a scalable VPN routing architecture that the provider can implement simply by modifying the configuration of routers in the provider network, without requiring changes to the router hardware and software. Relaying substantially reduces the memory footprint of VPNs by choosing a small number of hub routers in each VPN that maintain full reachability information, and by allowing nonhub routers to reach other routers through a hub. Deploying Relaying in pra...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2008
• Where: SIGMETRICS
• Authors: Changhoon Kim, Alexandre Gerber, Carsten Lund, Dan Pei, Subhabrata Sen
• Keywords: Customer, Hardware, Provider Network, Router, SIGMETRICS 2008