News

João Luís Sobrinho, researcher from IT, was awarded the 2015 Applied Networking Research Prize (ANRP) with his work DRAGON (Distribute-Route Aggregation on the Global Network).

Understanding the scalability challenges facing the Internet, João Sobrinho, together with fellow researchers Laurent Vanbever (ETH), Franck LE (IBM) and Jeniffer Rexford (Princeton University) developed DRAGON as a solution to scale the Internet Routing System.
DRAGON’s basic version consists of a filtering strategy that reduces the amount of routing information in every Autonomous System by about 50%; DRAGON's full version includes as well an aggregation strategy that boosts the reduction on the amount of routing state to about 80%.

This is a whole new paradigm on the internet scalability as previous work either resorts to sequential algorithms to reduce the size of forwarding tables independently at each router, or requires major changes to the Internet architecture. By contrast, DRAGON is a distributed algorithm running across all Autonomous Systems: it is compatible with today’s Internet routing system and it can be deployed incrementally.

DRAGON was awarded one of the 5 Applied Networking Research Prize selected from 33 eligible nominations, after a review “by 3-5 members of the selection committee according to a diverse set of criteria, including scientific excellence and substance, timeliness, relevance, and potential impact on the Internet.”

DRAGON was presented at the Internet Research Task Force (IRTF) open meeting and at the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) Routing Area open meeting in July this year.