Suffering Withdrawal; an automated approach to connectivity evaluation

Todays routers generally make themselves more- or less-attractive to transit traffic through operators manipulation of their interfaces IGP metrics or overload s …

Today’s routers generally make themselves more- or less-attractive to transit traffic through operator’s manipulation of their interfaces IGP metrics or overload status. This all-or-nothing method lacks granularity and does not take advantage of the wealth of connectivity and health-check information readily available at the router. We propose the notion of “connectedness value”, and describe an approach that allows a router to take pre-configured actions depending on its current level of connectedness to the rest of the network. The “connectedness value” is derived from not only reachability information, but also from OAM data and other policy-based criteria. For each router, an operator can now define what “well-connected” means, and what should happen should the router becomes less than “well connected". In this presentation we will discuss the concepts around defining and acting on connectedness value, we well as the prototyping we have done for several use-cases relevant to a content-provider network with lots of remote POP/cache facilities. We will seek feedback from the community on the usability of the proposed approach, as well as ideas for enhancements.