A truly modular routing protocol

Routing protocols such as OSPF/IS-IS or BGP play a very important role in today’s Internet. They distribute the routing tables and allow devices to communicate around the world. They are the keystone of the internet. These protocols have evolved over decades, and they have been extended with incremental modifications. Those modifications have taken years to be standardized, implemented and eventually deployed. This induces nowadays a real shortage of interior gateway protocols which leads network engineers to use EGP in IGP use cases. Some solutions have been explored by researchers, but they are not perfect. By conjugating algebras of metarouting, we can easily derive lots of different routing algebras which could be used in IGP protocols. Therefor we worked in three steps: first we read, understood and summarized all the papers about Sobrinho’s algebras in order to produce both a mathematically rigorous definition and an easily understandable description of each of them. Then we implemented them in C language in a very extensible way and developed a test suite to check their correctness. Finally, we partially include them in an existing implementation of RIPng using uBPF as interface.