Route Bazaar: Automatic Interdomain Contract Negotiation

Abstract

While it is widely acknowledged that the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) has many flaws, most of the proposed fixes focus solely on improving the stability and security of its path computation. However, because interdomain routing involves contracts between Autonomous Systems (ASes), this paper argues that contractual and routing issues should be tackled jointly. We propose Route Bazaar, a backward-compatible system for flexible Internet connectivity. Inspired by the decentralized construction of trust in cryptocurrencies, Route Bazaar uses a decentralized public ledger and cryptography to provide ASes with automatic means to form, establish, and verify end-to-end connectivity agreements.