In this talk, I will present the design and evaluation of a new Internet routing architecture (NIRA). The present Internet routing system suffers from two problems: one structural and one architectural. The structural problem is that the current system has little support for users to choose domain-level routes. User choice plays an important role in creating market competition, which fosters innovation and the introduction of new services. The architectural problem is that the current system fails to scale effectively in the presence of real-world requirements such as multi-homing.

NIRA is a scalable architecture that gives a user the ability to choose domain-level routes. The design of NIRA addresses four problems: how routes are discovered and selected, how routes are efficiently represented, how route failures are detected, and how providers are compensated. NIRA augments a strict provider-rooted addressing hierarchy with a new topology distribution and address allocation capability to enable scalable route discovery and efficient route representation. It combines proactive notification and reactive discovery for fast failure detection. NIRA's provider compensation model is still contract-based. The evaluation of NIRA suggests that it is practical.