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Concluded WG New Internet Routing and Addressing Architecture (nimrod)

Note: The data for concluded WGs is occasionally incorrect.

WG Name New Internet Routing and Addressing Architecture
Acronym nimrod
Area Routing Area (rtg)
State Concluded
Charter charter-ietf-nimrod-01 Approved
Document dependencies
Personnel Chairs David Bridgham, Isidro M. Castineyra, J. Noel Chiappa
Mailing list Address nimrod-wg@bbn.com
To subscribe nimrod-wg-request@bbn.com
Archive ftp://bbn.com/pub/nimrod-wg/nimrod-wg.archive

Final Charter for Working Group

The goal of the working group is to design, specify, implement and test a
flexible new routing and addressing architecture suitable for very large
scale internets. The basic architecture for computation of routes will
be based on distribution of network topology maps, with source-specified
route selection, and unitary (i.e., not hop-by-hop) computation of routes.

The architecture will provide a single homogeneous framework for all
routing, including both inter-domain and intra-domain. It will include a
new network component naming abstraction hierarchy, starting from network
attachment points, and based on actual connectivity, but taking into
consideration policy requirements. These new names will be variable
length, with a variable number of levels of abstraction; they will not
appear in most packets, though.

Actual packet forwarding will be based both on retained non-critical
state in the switches (via flow setup for long-lived communications), and
both classical address-only, as well as source-route type instructions, in
individual packets (for datagram applications which send only one, or a very
few, packets).

Although the general design and algorithms will be usable in any
internetworking protocol family, the initial detailed protocol
specifications and implementation are currently planned for deployment
with IPv4, but support for another packet format may be substituted or
added, depending on the situation in the Internet in the future.
Interoperabilty with existing unmodified IPv4 hosts will be achieved by
re-interpreting the existing source and destination fields in IPv4
packets as endpoint identifiers.

A substantial effort to take into account support for mobility,
multicast and resource allocation will be made when designing the Nimrod
architecture; provided that so doing is neither impossible because of
incomplete work outside the scope of Nimrod, nor the cause of very
substantial delays in the first iteration of the protocol design.

Milestones

Date Milestone Associated documents
Jul 1996 After assessing the performance of the protocols and sample algorithms, based on operational experience, release an updated protocol specification and sample algorithms.
Oct 1995 Complete an initial field trial of the prototype protocol and implementation.
Jul 1995 Finish an initial prototype protocol implementation, suitable for experimentation within the Internet, to allow field trials.
Dec 1994 Issue a usage guide as an Internet-Draft. This guide will describe recommended clustering strategies and configurations.
Nov 1994 Finish design of all the detailed mechanisms, including sample algorithms for those parts which are outside the core specification. Issue an Internet-Draft describing these.
Sep 1994 Produce a first version of the protocol specification, which embodies the completed basic routing and addressing architecture. Issue this document as an Internet-Draft.

Done milestones

Date Milestone Associated documents
Done Commence project.
Done Issue Internet-Drafts containing the design of the basic routing and addressing architecture and protocols.
Done Produce a draft architecture document, which will also serve as an in-depth introduction to Nimrod.
Done Complete the review and discussion of the fundamentals of the routing and addressing architecture.