A middleware based approach for designing routing protocols

The design and architecting for new routing protocols is an expensive task; either in time-consumption or costs. Routing protocols are complex systems; they manage distributed network state (sometimes the whole network), in order to create and maintain the routing databases. Existing routing protocol implementations are compact, bundling together a database, a (optimal) path calculation algorithm and a network state distribution mechanism. This paper presents a middleware-based approach for designing and managing the routing protocols. The approach analyzes the protocol functionality based on the idea of decomposing routing protocols into fundamental building blocks and identifying the role of each component, Finally, the paper proposes a framework on how new routing protocols could be dynamically composed from a hierarchy of basic classes. For implementation we used the distributed object platform OMG's CORBA.