Conference Paper

With the rapid evolution and diversification of Internet applications, their communication-quality criteria are continuously evolving. To globally optimize communication quality, the Internet's control plane thus needs to optimize inter-domain paths on diverse criteria, and should provide extensibility for adding new criteria or modifying existing ones. However, current inter-domain routing protocols and proposals satisfy these requirements at best to a limited degree. We argue that an inter-domain routing architecture with extensible routing criteria can be realized in path-aware networks, due to their stateless forwarding. We thus propose IREC, an inter-domain routing architecture for the SCION path-aware Internet architecture that enables path optimization with extensible criteria. IREC achieves this through parallel execution and real-time addition of independent route computations, together enabling end domains to express their desired criteria to the control plane. Through large-scale simulations with realistic Internet topologies, we show IREC's viability via implementation and emulation, and its negligible global cost compared to static routing protocols.