Shedding light on the complexity of enterprise routing design: A case study
Xin Sun · 2017
Enterprise networks often have complex routing designs as a result to meet a variety of requirements such as resiliency and routing policies. The high complexity in the routing design makes the networks hard to operate and migrate. However, currently there is little work on exposing or analyzing this design complexity. This paper seeks to fill this gap. Using an illustrative example, we begin by breaking down the challenges of routing design along two structural dimensions: policy groups and routing instances and discussing the complexity resulted from each dimension in details. We then use a case study of an operational enterprise network to reveal the fundamental complexity in enterprise routing design, and to connect the design complexity to the design requirements. By contrasting two different routing designs used for the same network, We expose important sources of complexity. We then present an important design principle for complexity-aware top-down enterprise routing design. We believe this study is a step forward in the direction of network complexity research, and will shed new insight in understanding and potentially reducing network management complexity.