Routing with the Clue (RC) over IP Networks

Internet Protocol (IP) becomes the most important protocol as the core protocol used in the world’s largest network. The larger IP network size it becomes the higher IP addressing delay the network has to consume, so many techniques are invented to increase the performance of the IP lookup process. One of the most interesting ideas is Routing with a Clue (RC) which introduces the distributed IP lookup. This paper compares the performance of the distributed IP lookup with conventional IP lookup process by applying to expandable meshed network. We simulated up to three meshed nodes network. Then, the performance matrices such as throughput, mean queue length (MQL), mean waiting time (MWT), and utilization factor, is collected by the simulation in order to explain the effect of expanding network (scalability) versus the performance of both networks. Results indicate that RC network outperforms vis-à-vis the conventional IP network in terms of expanding the network size. Moreover, the performance of the RC network is not dropping much compared to those of the IP network. The input traffic fluctuates into the first mesh causing higher burden for nodes in the first mesh than ones in the next adjacent mesh, so performance parameters for nodes in the first mesh is clearly to be lower than those in the next meshes. Results from nodes in the higher mesh indicate that the nodes will handle little low traffic, in other words they experience fewer packets waiting in the queue. Especially in RC network, MWT for nodes in the last mesh is next to zero. The reason is that over RC network, IP lookup process is distributed to all nodes along the path, so packet holding (check for address) is reduced reflecting all performance parameters, such as throughputs, MQL, MWT, and utilization factor to be better than the conventional IP network. Moreover, once the mesh network is increased, RC network can still stabilize throughputs while the conventional IP networks cannot be maintained. This can be proven by conducting the “O” notation for both RC network and IP network. From mathematical point of view, the “O” notation as of processing time in packet holding for both networks will be derived. The calculation results from the notation are relevant to the simulation results. That is, the performance of RC network depends solely on the address length existing in the RC packets, but the performance of IP network depends on both address length as well as number of prefixes utilized in the table. Key-Words: IP Routing, Routing with a Clue, Distributed IP Lookup, Mesh Topology