A Model of Configuration Languages for Routing Protocols

The emergence of programmable routers brings opportunities to design and implement new routing protocols with expressive policy, that better meet the needs of network operators than the current range of protocols. This also introduces significant challenges in designing and understanding protocols. Algebraic routing provides a useful but highly abstract model of networks as weighted graphs, ignoring the complex distributed configuration and computation aspects of practical routing protocols. We present an algebraic model of router configuration languages, reducing the gap between the routing theory and real implementations, as the basis for a language that can be used to specify the operation of routing protocols. Categories and Subject Descriptor