NIRA: A New Inter-Domain Routing architecture
Xiaowei Yang, Member, IEEE, David Clark, Fellow, IEEE, and Arthur W. Berger
IEEE/ACM TRANSACTIONS ON NETWORKING, VOL. 15, NO. 4,

Abstract—
In today’s Internet, users can choose their local Internet service providers (ISPs), but once their packets have entered the network, they have little control over the overall routes their packets take. Giving a user the ability to choose between provider-level routes has the potential of fostering ISP competition
to offer enhanced service and improving end-to-end performance and reliability. This paper presents the design and evaluation of a new Internet routing architecture (NIRA) that gives a user the ability to choose the sequence of providers his packets take. NIRA addresses a broad range of issues, including practical
provider compensation, scalable route discovery, efficient route representation, fast route fail-over, and security. NIRA supports user choice without running a global link-state routing protocol. It breaks an end-to-end route into a sender part and a receiver part and uses address assignment to represent each part. A user can
specify a route with only a source and a destination address, and switch routes by switching addresses. We evaluate NIRA using combination of network measurement, simulation, and analysis. Our evaluation shows that NIRA supports user choice with low overhead.