In this thesis we propose VIRO—a novel and paradigm-shifting approach to network routing and forwarding that is not only highly scalable and robust, but also is namespace-independent. VIRO provides several advantages over existing network routing architectures, including: i) VIRO directly and simultaneously addresses the challenges faced by IP networks as well as those associated with the traditional layer-2 technologies such as Ethernet—while retaining its “plug-&-play” feature. ii) VIRO provides a uniform convergence layer that inte- grates and unifies routing and forwarding performed by the traditional layer-2 (data link layer) and layer-3 (network layer), as prescribed by the conventional local-area/wide-area network dichotomy and layered architecture. iii) Perhaps more importantly, VIRO decouples routing from addressing , and thus is namespace-independent. Hence VIRO allows new (global or local) addressing and naming schemes (e.g., HIP or flat-id namespace) to be introduced into networks without the need to modify core router/switch functions, and can easily and flexibly support inter-operability between existing and new addressing schemes/namespaces.

In the second part of this thesis, we present Virtual Ethernet Id Layer, in short VEIL, a practical realization of VIRO routing protocol to create a large-scale Ethernet networks. VEIL is aimed at simplifying the management of large-scale enterprise networks by requiring minimal manual configuration overheads. It makes it tremendously easy to plug-in a new routing-node or a host-device in the network without requiring any manual configuration. It builds on top of a highly scalable and robust routing substrate provided by VIRO, and supports many advanced features such as seamless mobility support, built-in multi-path routing and fast-failure re-routing in case of link/node failures without requiring any specialized topologies. To demonstrate the feasibility of VEIL, we have built a prototype of VEIL, called veil-click , using Click Modular Router framework, which can be co-deployed with existing Ethernet switches, and does not require any changes to host-devices connecting to the network.