Mutually Controlled Routing with Independent ISPs

We present Wiser, an Internet routing protocol that enables ISPs to jointly control routing in a way that produces efficient end-to-end paths even when they act in their own interests. Wiser is a simple extension of BGP, uses only existing peering contracts for monetary exchange, and can be incrementally deployed. Each ISP selects paths in a way that presents a compromise between its own considerations and those of other ISPs. Done over many routes, this allows each ISP to improve its situation by its own optimization criteria compared to the use of BGP today. We evaluate Wiser using a routerlevel prototype and simulation on measured ISP topologies. We find that, unlike Internet routing today, Wiser consistently finds routes that are close in efficiency to that of global optimization for metrics such as path length. We further show that the overhead of Wiser is similar to that of BGP in terms of routing messages and computation.