Paper Review Assignment

This paper review is based on a scholarly paper on Design and Implementation of

routing control platform (RCP) by Matthew Caesar etal. In summary the authors

were interested in coming up with a prototype solution to problem associated with

Boarder Gateway Protocol (BGP) in terms of scalability, redundancy and many other

aspects as for as routing in Autonomous Systems (AS) is concerned. The authors

were coming from a background where large scale networks and ‘route reflections’

are causing undesirable issues like protocol oscillations and persistent loops.

I am of the view that the paper’s contribution was immensely useful especially in

the development of efficient and robust routing platforms which should be the

bedrock of very large networks and of late the software defined networks (SDN).

In trying to come up with a solution the authors explicitly explained the operating

principle to the readers of the boarder gateway routing protocol (BGP) which was

widely used at the time. They further went into introducing the subject of RCP, its

architecture, interoperability issues and some prior related work by other scholars
on the matter of route monitoring by building a system that also control BGP

routing decisions of network.

After coming up with their routing platform it is noted the designed system went

under rigorous tests to substantiate their claim and alternatives. Results from

these tests were presented in a clear graphical manner for easy of interpretation

and analysis. The methodologies used were also of great importance and realistic

whereby, BGP and OSPF data collected from a tier 1 internet service provider

(ISP) was used. For the evaluation of RCP server key metrics which are time taken

to perform customized per-router route selection under different conditions and

the memory required to maintain the various data structures.

Concluding this review, I am of the feeling that the research work by these

authors is of paramount importance since the researchers managed to come up

with a functional and better alternative to the legendary BGP. The fact that the

design of the RCP makes it easier for adoption due to the fact that it can be

implemented and integrated into an already existing BGP based network for

continuity. The RCP has proved to be better compared to BGP in terms of

scalability, memory management and time efficiency in routing executions.