11. Floodless in SEATTLE: A Scalable Ethernet Architecture for Large Enterprises

The authors try to build a protocol that integrates the scalability of IP and simplicity of Ethernet.

• Advantages of ethernet: persistent MAC addresses, bridged automatically to build routing table (ARP, DHCP); plug-and-play
• Disadvantages of ethernet: initial setup includes broadcasting, consumes resources, security and privacy issues
• Pros of IP: shortest-path routing
• Cons of IP: subnetting wastes address space; Virtual LANs (VLANs) inefficient for large spanning trees

SEATTLE (Scalable Ethernet Architecture for Large Enterprises):

• one-hope, network layer DHT: stores the location of each end-host, distributed directory
• traffic-drive location resolution and caching: routers cache responses to queries; includes location info on ARP replies
• scalable, prompt cache-update protocol: based on unicast, instead of broadcast/timeout to update cache

Simulation: measures on cache eviction timeout, forwarding table size, path stability, switch failure rate, and host mobility rate.

Comment: In view of the high human-error rate of the previous reading "BPG Misconfiguration," SEATTLE's idea about making the network "plug-and-play-able" seems to be very convenient and fool-proof. While at the same time, it provides network administrators to customize network transport. Since this is a 2008 paper, I wonder how it works in the real world?