Supporting Dynamic Inter-Domain Network Composition: Domain discovery

When two administratively independent domains need to engage in cooperation of some kind, some initial common known point of contact must exist, both in terms of the application topological position (i.e., IP address, transport protocol and port) and in terms of the interface technology (e.g., the protocol suite of the interaction). In a world of many domains of many types (not necessarily Autonomous Systems in the sense of interdomain routing), manual or single-directory-based operations are not practical (or even feasible); hence, some form of autonomic discovery and handshaking of domains is needed. We propose and evaluate several strategies to allow autonomic bootstrapping of inter-domain operations, all fit to be deployed as BGP extensions. We show the time/message overhead tradeoff: it's possible to obtain the absolute minimum message complexity of O(N) but at the cost of central administrative burden or, for fully distributed schemes, a tradeoff (message/time complexity) of O(N ²)/O(N) or O(N²)/O(log₂N).