Abstract

The document "FIB Suppression with Virtual Aggregation" [I-D.francis-intra-va] describes how router FIB size may be reduced. This approach entails a trade-off between path-length and load versus FIB size. It also has the potential to reduce convergence time. This document describes the results of several studies that examine these characteristics. The results of a study for a Tier-1 ISP with a relatively sophisticated deployment of VA, shows that FIB size could be reduced ten times or more with a worst-case latency penalty of 4ms and a worst-case load increase of <1.5%. Another study, examining a much simpler style of VA deployment, also for a Tier-1 ISP, shows that FIB size can be reduced by four times (in routers serving as APRs), and more than 10 times in other routers. Here, worst-case latency increase was 16 ms, though this is almost certainly an over-estimate, both because traceroute was used to make the measurement, and because popular prefixes were not considered.

Authors

Hitesh Ballani (hitesh@cs.cornell.edu)
Paul Francis (francis@mpi-sws.org)
Dan Jen (jenster@cs.ucla.edu)
Xiaohu Xu (xuxh@huawei.com)
Lixia Zhang (lixia@cs.ucla.edu)

(Note: The e-mail addresses provided for the authors of this Internet-Draft may no longer be valid.)