A Protocol for Route Establishment and Packet Forwarding Across Multidomain Internets

Internetworks that are global in scale, contain multiple administrative domains, and support a range of services present special requirements for routing. Multiple administrative domains introduce the need for policy-sensitive routing. Service heterogeneity intensifies the requirement for type of service (TOS) routing, as well as other protocol support for handling a range of services, from datagrams to multimedia streams. This paper summarizes the key concepts and protocols developed as part of the Interdomain Policy Routing (IDPR) architecture. We place particular emphasis on the route installation and packet forwarding mechanisms because they are critical to protocol performance and differ significantly from current practice in datagram wide area networks. © 1993 IEEE