Towards Local Routing State in the Future Internet Rafael Pasquini 1 ,F´ abio Luciano Verdi 2 and Maur´ ıcio Ferreira Magalh˜ aes 3 1 Federal University of Uberlˆ andia (FACOM/UFU) Uberlˆ andia – MG – Brazil 2 Federal University of S˜ ao Carlos (UFSCar) Sorocaba – SP – Brazil 3 State University of Campinas (DCA/FEEC/UNICAMP) Campinas – SP – Brazil pasquini@facom.ufu.br, verdi@ufscar.br, mauricio@dca.fee.unicamp.br Abstract. The name-dependent Internet routing mechanism requires the pres- ence of global routing state (all non-aggregatable IP prefixes) in the routing tables for traffic forwarding, and relies on hierarchy for scalability. However, practices like multi-homing, and traffic engineering compromise the hierarchi- cal structure and its overall scalability. This paper briefly introduces a name- independent routing mechanism, built on top of flat Autonomous Systems (ASes) identifiers, that requires local routing state as an alternative for traffic forward- ing at Internet scale, and analyzes its operation in the real Internet graph com- posed of approximately 33000 ASes. 1. Introduction The current research on the weak aspects present in the name-dependent routing mech- anism used in the Internet Default Free Zone (DFZ) [Meyer et al. 2007], where all non-aggregatable IP prefixes are advertised using the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) across the entire network, motivates this work. This paper proposes the use of a name- independent flat routing mechanism which employs bitwise exclusive or (XOR) opera- tions [Pasquini 2011, Pasquini et al. 2010] for building its routing tables and for traffic forwarding, as an alternative for routing at Internet scale directly on top of flat AS IDs. Essentially, the current Internet routing system is strongly based on a hierarchical network organization to achieve scalability, but practices like multi-homing, traffic en- gineering and the usage of provider independent addresses compromise this hierarchical structure, forcing a fast growth in the routing tables [Meyer et al. 2007]. Conversely, the proposed XOR-based mechanism requires the presence of only a fraction of the entire routing information available in the network for traffic forwarding, composing a local routing state approach for routing in the Future Internet. This paper presents results regarding the operation of the proposed XOR-based mechanism in the real Internet AS topology available at CAIDA [CAIDA 2011], currently composed of approximately 33000 ASes. Such results where obtained using a developed emulation tool, which is able to load the topology, instantiating independent threads to emulate each individual node (AS) present on it. The emulated nodes are uniquely identi- fied by using the original 16-bit AS IDs, and are provided with an entire implementation of the proposed dynamic distributed routing mechanism, being capable of independently building their own routing tables and forwarding traffic between them. 10 Anais