Ron is a really good name for a project. It just reads well.
RON is a "Resilient Overlay Network". It makes a lot of sense in an area where there are significant network problems. The overlay allows for more informed, better routing decisions. Specifically it routes around trouble spots in the internet. It can also be used to enforce policies among the routers that can't be enforced at the BGP layer.
The largest problem with this paper is that their justification went away. I very seldom experience outages. In fact, I can't remember the last one. I do know that my last outage was my home router anyhow. People get paid a lot of money to make sure that core routers don't tip over. These guys did not anticipate the internet becoming quite the serious business it is now.
My guess is that is early "Look at fun stuff we can do with overlays!" work. This is valid for spotty networks, but I've developed a hypothesis from our readings in this class. Anything that doesn't optimize throughput eventually gets phased out. In the common case of a working network, the network engineers have decided that you should take this path to google, and they know WAY more than you about their network setup. You should probably trust them.
Oh, and another note. Fantastic use of e2e!
2 comments:
Maybe one doesn't experience outages commonly these days because ISP's have RON-like mechanisms implemented in their network? Just a guess...
I don't think ISP's have RON, but content distribution networks like Akamai or Limelight may well make use of these techniques. This is speculation.
Kurtis raises another interesting issue -- has the BGP dynamics -- the main cause of "bad routes" gone away as we have learned how to configure AS-AS communication better. It is a very good question!
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