(Demo) Boléro: Enabling Policy Innovation in Interdomain Routing

Zhijia Chen, Anduo Wang

Abstract: BGP is known to restrict policy expressiveness and induce monolithic policies with uncontrolled interactions among ASes that are hard to understand, reuse, and evolve. We argue that the use of a path vector system as the carrier of interdomain policy is the root causes of these limitations. To this end, we propose an alternative policy scheme built in a software-defined controller to decouple policy making from the path vector system. This new software-defined scheme creates new space for policy language, route decision, and conflict resolution design, towards flexible policies, cleaner policy enforcement, and controlled policy interaction. In this demonstration, we showcase boléro, a realization of our vision via the use of data integrity constraints --- logical statements about what are the acceptable network states --- for representing and reasoning about AS policies, addressing unique challenges in the decentralized interdomain environment.