Name: EVERSON SCHERRER BORGES
Publication date: 31/10/2025
Examining board:
Name |
Role |
|---|---|
| CRISTINA KLIPPEL DOMINICINI | Coorientador |
| DIEGO ROBERTO COLOMBO DIAS | Examinador Interno |
| LEANDRO CAVALCANTI DE ALMEIDA | Examinador Externo |
| LEOBINO NASCIMENTO SAMPAIO | Examinador Externo |
| MAGNOS MARTINELLO | Presidente |
Pages
Summary: A historical perspective on path awareness in network design reveals two main paradigms:
intelligent routers with simple hosts, and intelligent hosts with simple routers. While the
former relies on routers to manage path selection and network awareness, it was ultimately
not adopted due to the Internet’s minimalist design philosophy. Instead, the prevailing
model aligns with the end-to-end argument, where complexity is placed at the network
edges—end hosts are responsible for handling reliability, packet loss, and congestion con-
trol, while routers are kept simple, focusing solely on forwarding packets. This approach
became the foundation of today’s Internet architecture.
However, this model provides little or no path verification, preventing applications
from controlling or confirming the exact route taken. Consequently, many available paths
remain unused, their quality unknown, and risks such as tra!c deviation or forwarding
errors may arise. To address these challenges, path-awareness must ensure three essen-
tial properties: (i) Verifiability to check the packets went through the correct path; (ii)
Controllability to select the specific path; (iii) Visibility providing path information to
support the path selection.
Most existing approaches in the literature, specifically related to path verification,
generally impose significant computational overhead at the source or core nodes and
cannot be e!ciently deployed on programmable switches. These solutions typically rely
on mechanisms such as origin tracing, chained MACs, or nested cryptographic structures
to achieve path verification. However, they are not designed to integrate path verification
natively within the routing process, limiting their applicability in programmable data
planes.
This thesis introduces a novel path-aware network architecture that combines source
routing with the (Residue Number System (RNS)). In this design, a routeID encodes the
entire path that is decoded at each hop via modular operations, guiding the packet explic-
itly through a sequence of nodes with their respective ports rather than simply directing it
2
to a destination address. Beyond routing, the design enables the path verification within
the routing process. The routeID serves as a key for Proof-of-Transit lookups, extending
the IETF RFC draft by integrating Mersenne numbers to deploy Shamir Secret Sharing
in programmable switches. A second, tableless design exploits the unique correspondence
between routeID and its set of nodeIDs to compute a chain of hash operations forming a
path signature, achieving intrinsic path verification - a property unattainable in existing
routing systems.
