KIRA: Distributed Scalable ID-based Routing with Fast Forwarding

Emerging network infrastructures are increasingly softwarized, virtualized and, thus, flexible. They may even be viewed as a large, dynamic, and distributed elastic resource pool of network devices that can be flexibly configured and employed according to the needs of network services. Full control of such a resource pool requires resilient control plane connectivity. In this paper, we present KIRA, a two-tier routing architecture that provides self-organized, zero-touch, and extremely robust control plane connectivity. KIRA consists of the distributed, highly scalable, ID-based routing protocol R²/Kad that can run on top of any link layer. It is complemented by a forwarding tier with PathID-based fast forwarding for (control) data packets. KIRA shows excellent performance even in very large networks (evaluated with up to 200000 nodes). R²/Kad allows for flexible memory/stretch tradeoff per node and finds shortest paths to certain destinations in most cases. R²/Kad converges loop-free and fast, even in very large networks with drastic failure scenarios.