Modeling Complexity of Enterprise Routing Design

Abstract

Enterprise networks often have complex routing designs given the need to meet a wide set of resiliency, security and routing policies. In this paper, we take the position that minimizing design complexity must be an explicit objective of routing design. We take a first step to this end by presenting a systematic approach for modeling and reasoning about complexity in enterprise routing design. We make three contributions. First, we present a framework for precisely defining objectives of routing design, and for reasoning about how a combination of routing design primitives (e.g. routing instances, static routes, and route filters etc.) will meet the objectives. Second, we show that it is feasible to quantitatively measure the complexity of a routing design by modeling individual routing design primitives, and leveraging configuration complexity metrics [5]. Our approach helps understand how individual design choices made by operators impact configuration complexity, and can enable quantifying design complexity in the absence of configuration files. Third, we validate our model and demonstrate its utility through a longitudinal analysis of the evolution of the routing design of a large campus network over the last three years. We show how our models can enable comparison of the complexity of multiple routing designs that meet the same objective, guide operators in making design choices that can lower complexity, and enable what-if analysis to assess the potential impact of a configuration change on routing design complexity.