IRTF Routing Research Elwyn Davies, Avri Doria, Nortel Networks
Internet Draft Malin Carlzon, SUNET
Anders Bergsten, Olle Pers, Yong Jiang, Telia Research
Lenka Carr Motyckova, Pierre Fransson, Olov Schelen
Lulea University of Technology
February, 2001
Future Domain Routing Requirements
<draft-davies-fdr-reqs-00.txt>
Status of this Memo
This document is an Internet Draft and is in full conformance with
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Copyright Notice
Copyright (C) The Internet Society (2001). All Rights Reserved.
Abstract
This document sets out a set of requirements which we believe are
desirable for the future routing architecture and routing
protocols of a successful Internet. This first version is, of
necessity, incomplete. It is hoped that this document will be
useful as a catalyst to the work that needs to be done in both the
IRTF and the IETF.
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CONTENTS
1. Introduction...................................................... 4
1.1 Background.................................................... 5
1.2 Goals ........................................................ 6
2. Historical Perspective .......................................... 10
2.1 The legacy of RFC1126........................................ 10
2.2 Nimrod Requirements.......................................... 19
2.3 PNNI ........................................................ 21
3. Existing problems of BGP and the current EGP/IGP Architecture.... 22
3.1 BGP and Auto-aggregation .................................... 22
3.2 Convergence and Recovery Issues ............................. 22
3.3 Non-locality of Effects of Instability and Misconfiguration . 23
3.4 Multihoming Issues........................................... 23
3.5 AS-number exhaustion......................................... 24
3.6 Partitioned AS's............................................. 24
3.7 Load Sharing................................................. 25
3.8 Hold down issues............................................. 25
3.9 Interaction between Inter domain routing and intra domain
routing .................................................... 26
3.10 Policy Issues............................................... 26
3.11 Security Issues............................................. 27
3.12 Support of MPLS and VPNS ................................... 27
3.13 IPv4 / IPv6 Ships in the Night ............................. 28
3.14 Existing Tools to Support Effective Deployment of Inter-
Domain Routing ............................................. 29
4. Expected Users .................................................. 30
4.1 Organisations................................................ 30
4.2 Human Users.................................................. 32
5. Mandated Constraints ............................................ 33
5.1 The Federated Environment ................................... 33
5.2 Working with different sorts of network ..................... 34
5.3 Delivering Diversity......................................... 34
5.4 When will the new solution be required? ..................... 34
6. Assumptions...................................................... 36
7. Functional Requirements ......................................... 38
7.1 Topology .................................................... 38
7.2 Distribution................................................. 39
7.3 Addressing................................................... 41
7.4 Management Requirements...................................... 42
7.5 Mathematical Provability .................................... 42
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7.6 Traffic Engineering.......................................... 43
7.7 Multi-homing support......................................... 43
7.8 Statistics support........................................... 44
8. Performance Requirements ........................................ 45
9. Backwards compatibility (cutover) and Maintainability ........... 46
10. Security Requirements .......................................... 47
11. Open Issues..................................................... 48
11.1 System Modeling............................................. 48
11.2 Advantages and Disadvantages of having the same protocols
for EGP and IGP ........................................... 48
11.3 Introduction of new control mechanisms ..................... 52
11.4 Robustness.................................................. 52
11.5 VPN Support................................................. 52
11.6 End to End Reliability...................................... 53
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1. Introduction
It is generally accepted that there are major shortcomings in the
inter-domain routing of the Internet today and that these may
result in meltdown within an unspecified period of time.
Remedying these shortcomings will require extensive research to
tie down the exact failure modes that lead to these shortcomings
and identify the best techniques to remedy the situation.
Various developments in the nature and quality of the services
that users want from the Internet are difficult to provide within
the current framework as they impose requirements which were never
foreseen by the original architects of the Internet routing
system.
Taken together with the radically altered and now commercially-
based organization of the Internet and the potential advent of
IPv6, major changes to the inter-domain routing system are
inevitable.
Although inter-domain routing is seen as the major source of
problems, the interactions with intra-domain routing and the
constraints that confining changes to the inter-domain would
impose, means that we should consider the whole area of routing as
an integrated system. This is done for 2 reasons:
- Requirements should not presuppose the solution. A continued
commitment to the current definitions and split between inter-
domain and intra-domain routing would constitute such a
presupposition. Therefore the name Future Domain Routing
(FDR)is being used in this document,
- As an acknowledgement of how intertwined inter-domain and
intra-domain routing are within today's routing architecture.
Although the meaning of Domain Routing will be developed
implicitly throughout the document, a bit of explicit definition
of the word `domain' is required. This document uses domain in a
very broad sense to mean any collection of systems or domains
which come under a common authority that determines the attributes
that define, and the policies that control that collection. The
use of domain in this context is very similar to the concept of
Region that was put forth by John Wroclawski in his Metanet model
[10]. The idea includes the notion that within a domain certain
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system attributes will characterize the behavior of the systems in
the domain and that there will be borders between domains. The
idea of domain presented does not inherently presuppose that the
identifying behaviors between two domains are to be the same. Nor
does it presuppose anything about the hierarchical nature of
domains. Finally it does not place restrictions on the nature of
the attributes that might be used to determine membership in a
domain. Since today's routing domains are a subset of all domains
as conceived of in this document, there has been no attempt to
create a new term.
This draft makes a start on this process in Section 2 by
revisiting the requirements for a future routing system which were
last documented in RFC1126 - "Goals and Functional Requirements
for Inter-Autonomous System Routing" [4] as a precursor to the
design of BGP in 1989. The historical perspective is also fleshed
out by looking at some other work that has been carried out since
RFC1126 was published. Some of the requirements derive from the
problems that are currently being experienced in the Internet
today. These will be discussed in Section 3. The environment in
which the future domain routing system will have to work is
covered in Sections 4 - 6. Specific requirements for a future
Domain routing system are discussed in Sections 7 - 10.
Inevitably this document is incomplete: Some known Open Issues are
discussed in Section 11.
1.1 Background
Today's Internet uses an addressing and routing structure which
has developed in ad hoc, more or less upwards compatible fashion
from the essentially single domain, non-commercial Internet to a
solution which is handling, albeit not totally satisfactorily,
today's multi-domain, federated, combined commercial and not-for-
profit Internet. The result is not ideal, particularly as regards
inter-domain routing mechanisms which have to implement a host of
domain specific routing policies for competing, communicating
domains.
Based a large body of anecdotal evidence, but also on experimental
evidence [11] and analytic work on the stability of BGP under
certain policy specifications [12], the main Internet inter-domain
routing protocol, BGP4, appears to have a number of problems which
need to be resolved. Some of these problems may be relieved by
patches and fix-ups and some of these problems may require a new
architecture and new protocols. The starting point of this work is
to step back from the current state, examine how the Internet
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might develop in the future and derive a new set of requirements
for a routing architecture from this work.
The development of the Internet is likely to be driven by a number
of changes that will affect the organization and the usage of the
network, including:
- Ongoing evolution of the commercial relationships between
(connectivity) service providers, leading to changes in the way
in which peering between providers is organised and the way in
which transit traffic is routed
- Requirements for traffic engineering within and between domains
including coping with multiple paths between domains
- Potential addition of a second IP addressing technique through
IPv6.
- Incorporation of alternative forwarding techniques such as the
pipes supplied by combined MPLS and Optical Lambda environments
- Support for alternative and multiple routing techniques which
are better suited to delivering some types of content.
1.2 Goals
This section attempts to answer two questions:
What are we trying to achieve in a new architecture?
Why should the Internet community care?
There is a third question which needs to be answered as well, but
which, for the present, is mostly not explicitly discussed:
How will we know when we have succeeded?
1.2.1 Providing a Routing System matched to Domain Organisation
Many of today's routing problems are caused by a routing system
which is not well-matched to the organization and policies which
it is trying to support. It is our goal to develop a routing
architecture where even domain organization which is not
envisioned today can be served by a routing architecture that
matches its requirements.
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We will know when this goal is achieved when the desired policies,
rules and organization can be mapped into the routing system in a
natural, consistent and simply understood way.
1.2.2 Supporting a range of different communication services
Currently only best-effort datagram connectivity is supported in
BGP. With, for example, DiffServ it is possible to construct
different services within the network. A number of PDBs has been
proposed to the IETF. Also a number of services has been talked
about outside the IETF. These services might for example be
Virtual Wire [18] and Assured rate [19].
Providers today promise how traffic will be handled in the
network, for example delay and packet loss guarantees, and this
will probably be even more relevant in the future. Communicating
this information (i.e., the service characteristics) in routing
protocols is necessary in near future.
Thus, a goal with this architecture is to allow for more
information passed between operators and support other services
than the best-effort datagram connectivity service.
1.2.3 Scaleable well beyond current predictable needs
Any proposed new FDR system should scale beyond the size and
performance we can foresee for the next ten years. The previous
IDR proposal has, with some massaging, held up for somewhat over
ten years in which time the Internet has grown far beyond the
predictions that were made in the requirements that were placed on
it originally.
1.2.4 Supporting alternative forwarding mechanisms
With the advent of circuit based technologies (e.g., MPLS [24],
G-MPLS [25]) managed by IP routers there are forwarding mechanisms
other than the datagram service that need to be supported by the
routing architecture.
An explicit goal of this architecture is to support more
forwarding mechanisms than just the datagram forwarding.
1.2.5 Supporting separation of topology map and connectivity service
It is envisioned that an organization can support multiple
services on top of a single network. These services can, for
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example, be of different quality, of different type of
connectivity, or different protocols (e.g. IPv4 and IPv6). For all
these services there may be common domain topology, even though
the policies might differ.
Thus, a goal with this architecture is to support separation
between creation of an domain (or organization) topology map and
service creation.
1.2.6 Achieving full/appropriate separation of concerns between
routing and forwarding
The architecture of a router is composed of two main separable
parts; control and forwarding. These components, while inter-
dependent, perform functions that are largely independent of each
other. Control (routing, signaling, and management) is typically
done in software while forwarding typically is done with
specialized ASICs or network processors.
The nature of an IP based network today is that control and data
protocols share the same network and forwarding regime. This may
not always be the case in future networks and we should be careful
to avoid building this sharing in as an assumption in the FDR.
A goal of this architecture is to support full separation of
control and forwarding.
1.2.7 Providing means of using different routing paradigms
seamlessly in different areas of the same network
A number of different routing paradigms have been used or
researched in addition to conventional shortest path hop-by-hop
paradigm that is the current mainstay of the Internet. In
particular, differences in underlying transport networks may mean
that other kinds of routing are more relevant, and the perceived
need for traffic engineering will certainly alter the routing
chosen in various domains.
1.2.8 Preventing denial of service and other security attacks
Part of the problem here is that the Internet offers a global,
unmoderated connectivity service. Existence of a route to a
destination effectively implies that anybody who can get a packet
onto the network is entitled to use that route. Whilst there are
limitations to this generalization, there is a clear invitation to
denial of service attacks. A goal of the FDR system should be to
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allow traffic to be specifically linked to whole or partial routes
so that a destination or link resources can be protected form
malicious use.
1.2.9 Providing provable convergence with verifiable policy
interaction
It has been shown both analytically by Griffin et al (see [12])
and practically (see [20]) that BGP will not converge stably or is
only meta-stable (i.e. will not reconverge in the face of a single
failure) when certain types of policy constraint are applied to
categories of network topology. The addition of policy to the
basic distance vector algorithm invalidates the mathematical
proofs that applied to RIP and could be applied to a policy free
BGP implementation.
A goal of the FDR should be to achieve mathematically provable
convergence of the protocols used which may involve constraining
the topologies used and vetting the polices imposed to ensure that
they are compatible across domain boundaries.
1.2.10 Providing robustness despite errors and failures
From time to time in the history of the Internet there have been
occurrences where global connectivity has been destroyed by people
misconfiguring routers. This should never be possible.
A goal of the FDR is to be robust to configuration errors and
failures. This should probably involve ensuring that the effects
of misconfiguration and failure can be confined to some suitable
locality of the failure or misconfiguration: This is not
currently the case as both misconfigurations and problems in any
AS can, under the right circumstances, have global effects across
the entire Internet.
1.2.11 Simplicity in management
With the policy work ([26], [27] and [28]) that has been done at
IETF there exists an architecture that standardizes and simplifies
management of QoS. This kind of simplicity is needed in a future
domain routing architecture and its protocols.
A goal of this architecture is to make configuration and
management of inter-domain routing as simple as possible.
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2. Historical Perspective
2.1 The legacy of RFC1126
RFC1126 outlined a set of requirements that were to guide the
development of BGP. While the network is definitely different then
it was in 1989, many of the same requirements remain. As a first
step in setting requirements for the future, we need to understand
the requirements that were originally set for the current
protocols. And in charting a future architecture we must first be
sure to do no harm. Which means a future domain routing has to
support as its base requirement, the level of function that is
available today.
The following sections each relate to a requirement, or non
requirement listed in RFC1126. In fact the section names are
direct quotes from the document. The discussion of these
requirements covers the following areas
Relevance: Is the requirement of RFC1126 still relevant, and to
what degree? Should it be understood differently in today's
environment?
Current practice: How well is the requirement met by current
protocols and practice.
2.1.1 "General Requirements"
2.1.1.1 "Route to Destination"
Timely routing to all reachable destinations, including
multihoming and multicast.
Relevance: Valid, but requirements for multihoming need further
discussion and elucidation. The requirement should include
multiple source multicast routing.
Current practice: Multihoming is not efficient and the proposed
inter-domain multicast protocol BGMP is an add-on to BGP
following many of the same strategies but not integrated into
the BGP framework [23].
2.1.1.2 "Routing is Assured"
This requires that a user be notified within a reasonable time
period of attempts, about inability to provide a service.
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Relevance: Valid
Current practice: There are ICMP messages for this, but in many
cases they are not used, either because of fears about creating
message storms or uncertainty about whether the end system can
do anything useful with the resulting information.
2.1.1.3 "Large System
The architecture was designed to accommodate the growth of the
Internet.
Relevance: Valid. Properties of Internet topology might be an
issue for future scalability (topology varies from a very
sparse to a quite dense now). Instead of setting growth in a
time-scale, indefinite growth should be accommodated.
Current practice: Scalability of the protocols will not be
sufficient under the current rate of growth . There are
problems with BGP convergence for large dense topologies,
problems with routing information propagation between routers
in transit domain, limited support for hierarchy, etc.
2.1.1.4 "Autonomous Operation"
Relevance: Valid. There may need to be additional requirements for
adjusting policy decisions to the global functionality and to
avoid contradictory policies would decrease a possibility of
unstable routing behavior.
There should also be a separate requirement for handling
various degrees of trust in autonomous operation, ranging from
no trust (e.g., between separate ISPs) to very high trust where
the domains have a common goal of optimizing their mutual
policies.
Policies for intra domain operations should in some cases be
revealed, using suitable abstractions, to a global routing
mechanism?
Current practice: Policy management is in the control of network
managers, as required, but there is little support for handling
policies at an abstract level for a domain. Cooperating
administrative entities decide about the extent of cooperation
independently.
2.1.1.5 "Distributed System"
The routing environment is a distributed system. The distributed
routing environment supports redundancy and diversity of nodes and
links. Both data and operations are distributed.
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Relevance: Valid. RFC1126 is very clear that we should not be
using centralized solutions, but maybe we need a requirement on
trade-offs between common knowledge and distribution (e.g., to
allow for uniform policy routing) (e.g., GSM systems are in a
sense centralized (but with hierarchies) and they work) This
requirement should not rule out certain solutions that are
needed to meet other requirements in this document.
Current practice: Routing is very distributed, but lacking
abilities to consider optimization over several hops or
domains.
2.1.1.6 "Provide A Credible Environment"
Routing mechanism information must be integral and secure
(credible data, reliable operation). Security from unwanted
modification and influence is required.
Relevance: Valid.
Current practice: BGP provides a mechanism for authentication and
security. There are however security problems with current
practice.
2.1.1.7 "Be A Managed Entity"
Requires that a manager should get enough information on a state
of network so that (s)he could make informed decisions.
Relevance: The requirement is reasonable, but we might need to be
more specific on what information should be available, e.g. to
prevent routing oscillations.
Current practice: All policies are determined locally, where they
may appear reasonable but there is no global coordination, and
therefore a manager cannot make a globally consistent decision.
2.1.1.8 "Minimize Required Resources"
Relevance: Valid, however, the paragraph states that assumptions
on significant upgrades shouldn't be made. Although this is
reasonable, a new architecture should perhaps be prepared to
use upgrades when they occur.
Current practice: Most bandwidth is consumed by the exchange of
the NLRI. Usage of CPU depends on the stability of the
Internet. Both phenomena have a local nature, so there are not
scaling problems with bandwidth and CPU usage. Instability of
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routing increases the consumption of resources in any case.
Memory requirements are dominated by the number of networks in
the Internet ¡ this is a scaling problem.
2.1.2 "Functional Requirements"
2.1.2.1 "Route Synthesis Requirements"
2.1.2.1.1 "Route around failures dynamically"
Relevance: Valid. Should perhaps be stronger. Only providing a
best-effort attempt may not be enough if real-time services are
to be provided for. Detections may need to be faster than 100ms
to avoid being noticed by end-users.
Current practice: latency of fail-over is too high (minutes).
2.1.2.1.2 "Provide loop free paths"
Relevance: Valid. Loops should occur only with negligible
probability and duration.
Current practice: both link-state intra domain routing and BGP
inter-domain routing (if correctly configured) are forwarding-
loop free after having converged. However, convergence time for
BGP can be very long and routing-loops may occur due to bad
routing policies.
2.1.2.1.3 "Know when a path or destination is unavailable"
Relevance: Valid to some extent, but there is a trade-off between
aggregation and immediate knowledge of reachability. It
requires that routing tables contain enough information to
determine that the destination is unknown or a path cannot be
constructed to reach it.
Current practice: Knowledge about lost reachability propagates
slowly through the networks due to slow convergence for route
withdrawals.
2.1.2.1.4 "Provide paths sensitive to administrative policies"
Relevance: Valid. Policy control of routing is of increasingly
importance as the Internet has turned into business.
Current practice: Supported to some extent. Policies are only
possible to apply locally in an AS and not globally. At least
there is very small possibilities to affect policies in other
AS's. Furthermore, only static policies are supported; between
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static policies and policies dependent upon volatile events of
great celerity there should exist events that routing should
be aware of. Lastly, there is no support for policies other
than route-properties (such as AS-origin, AS-path, destination
prefix, MED-values etc).
2.1.2.1.5 "Provide paths sensitive to user policies"
Relevance: Valid to some extent, as it may contradict with the
policies of the network administrator.
Current practice: not supported in normal routing. Can be
accomplished to some extent with lose source routing, resulting
in inefficient forwarding in the routers.
2.1.2.1.6 "Provide paths which characterize user
quality-of-service requirements"
Relevance: Valid to some extent, as it may contradict the policies
of the operator
Current practice: Creating routes with specified QoS is not
possible now.
2.1.2.1.7 "Provide autonomy between inter- and intra-autonomous
system route synthesis"
Relevance: Inter and intra domain routing should stay independent,
but one should notice that this to some extent contradicts the
previous three requirements. There is a trade-off between
abstraction and optimality.
Current practice: inter-domain routing is performed independently
of intra-domain routing. Intra-domain routing is, especially in
transit domains, very interrelated to inter-domain routing.
2.1.2.2 "Forwarding Requirements"
2.1.2.2.1 "Decouple inter- and intra-autonomous system
forwarding decisions"
Relevance: Valid.
Current practice: As explained in 2.1.2.1.7, intra-domain
forwarding in transit domains is codependent with inter-domain
forwarding decisions.
2.1.2.2.2 "Do not forward datagrams deemed administratively
inappropriate"
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Relevance: Valid, however packets that have been misrouted due to
transient routing problems perhaps should be forwarded to reach
the destination, although along an unexpected path.
Current practice: at stub domains there is packet filtering, e.g.,
to catch source address spoofing on outgoing traffic or to
filter out unwanted incoming traffic. In the backbone,
intentional packet dropping based on policies is not common.
2.1.2.2.3 "Do not forward datagrams to failed resources"
Relevance: blurry to some extent. There is a trade-off between
scalability and keeping track of unreachable resources. The
closer to a failing resource, the stronger reason for that the
failure should be known.
Current practice: routing protocols keep track of failing routers,
but not other resources (e.g., end-hosts switches etc.)
2.1.2.2.4 "Forward datagram according to its characteristics"
Relevance: Valid. Is necessary in enabling differentiation in the
network, based on QoS, precedence, policy or security.
Current practice: ingress and egress filtering can be done on
policy.
2.1.2.3 "Information Requirements
2.1.2.3.1 "Provide a distributed and descriptive information
base"
Relevance: Valid, however hierarchical IBs might provide more
possibilities.
Current practice: IBs are distributed, not sure whether they
support all provided routing functionality.
2.1.2.3.2 "Determine resource availability"
Relevance: Valid. It should be possible for reource availablity
and levels of resource availability to be determined. This
prevents needing to discover unavailabity through failure.
2.1.2.3.3 "Restrain transmission utilization"
Relevance: Valid. However certain requirements, as fast detection
of faults may be worth consumption of more resources.
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Current practice: BGP messages probably do not ordinarily consume
excessive resources, but might during erroneous conditions.
2.1.2.3.4 "Allow limited information exchange"
Relevance: Valid. But perhaps routing could be improved if certain
information could be globally available.
Current practice: Policies are used to determine which
reachability information that is exported.
2.1.2.4 "Environmental Requirements"
2.1.2.4.1 "Support a packet-switching environment"
Relevance: Valid but should not be exclusive.
Current practice: supported.
2.1.2.4.2 "Accommodate a connection-less oriented user transport
service"
Relevance: Valid, but should not be exclusive.
Current practice: accommodated.
2.1.2.4.3 "Accommodate 10K autonomous systems and 100K networks"
Relevance: No longer valid. Needs to be increased substantially.
Current Practice: Yes but perhaps reaching the limit.
2.1.2.4.4 "Allow for arbitrary interconnection of autonomous systems"
Relevance: Valid. However perhaps not all interconnections should
be used globally.
Current practice: BGP-4 allows for arbitrary interconnections.
2.1.2.5 "General Objectives"
2.1.2.5.1 "Provide routing services in a timely manner"
Relevance: Valid, stated before. The more complex a service is the
longer it should be allowed to take, linearly, polynomially,
exponentially (NP-complete problems?)
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Current practice: More or less, with the exception of convergence
and fault robustness.
2.1.2.5.2 "Minimize constraints on systems with limited
resources"
Relevance: Valid
Current practice: Systems with limited resources are typically
stub domains that advertise very little information.
2.1.2.5.3 "Minimize impact of dissimilarities between
autonomous systems"
Relevance: Important. This requirement is critical to a future
architecture. In a domain routing environment where the
internal properties of domains may differ radically, it will be
important to be sure that these dissimilarities are minimized
at the borders.
Current: practice: for the most part this capability isn't
required in today's networks since the intra-domain attribute
are nearly identical to start with.
2.1.2.5.4 "Accommodate the addressing schemes and protocol
mechanisms of the autonomous systems"
Relevance: Important
Current practice: Largely only one global addressing scheme is
supported in most autonomous systems.
2.1.2.5.5 "Must be implementable by network vendors"³
Requirement: Valid
Current practice: BGP was implemented;
2.1.3 "Non-Goals"
RFC1126 also included a section discussing non goals. To what
extent are these still non goals? Does the fact that they were
non-goals adversely affect today's IDR system?
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2.1.4 "Ubiquity"
In a sense this `non-goal' has effectively been achieved by the
Internet and IP protocols. This requirement reflects a different
world view where there was serious competition for network
protocols which is really no longer the case. Ubiquitous
deployment of inter-domain routing in particular has been achieved
and must not be undone by any proposed FDR. On the other hand,
ubiquitous connectivity cannot be reached in policy sensitive
environment and should not be an aim.
Relevance: De facto essential for a FDR but ensure that we mean
ubiquity of the routing system rather than ubiquity of
connectivity.
Current practice: de facto ubiquity achieved.
2.1.4.1 "Congestion control"
Relevance: Not clear if they mean routing or forwarding. It is
definitely a non-goal to adapt the choice of route at transient
congestion. However, to add support for congestion avoidance
(e.g., ECN and ICMP messages) in the forwarding process would
be OK.
Current practice: There exists some ICMP-messages (source quench)
but these are not used.
2.1.4.2 "Load splitting"
Relevance: This should not be a non-goal, or an explicit goal. It
might be desirable in some cases.
Current practice: Can be implemented by exporting different
prefixes on different links, but this requires manual
configuration and does not consider actual load.
2.1.4.3 "Maximizing the utilization of resources
Relevance: Valid. Cost-efficiency should be strived for,
maximizing resource utilization does not always lead to
greatest cost-efficiency.
2.1.4.4 "Schedule to deadline service"
This non-goal was put in place to ensure that the IDR did not have
to meet real time deadline goals such as might apply to CBR
services in ATM.
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Relevance: The hard form of deadline services is still a non-goal
for the FDR but overall delay bounds are much more of the
essence than was the case when RFC1126 was written.
Current Practice: Service providers are now offering overall
probabilistic delay bounds on traffic contracts. To implement
these contracts there is a requirement for a rather looser
form of delay sensitive routing.
2.1.4.5 "Non-interference policies of resource utilization"
The requirement in RFC1126 is somewhat opaque, but appears to
imply that what we would today call QoS routing is a non-goal and
that routing would not seek to control the elastic characteristics
of Internet traffic whereby a TCP connection can seek to utilize
all the spare bandwidth on a route, possibly to the detriment of
other connections sharing the route or crossing it.
Relevance: Open Issue. It is not clear whether dynamic QoS
routing can or should be implemented. Such a system would seek
to control the admission and routing of traffic depending on
current or recent resource utilization.
Current practice: Routing does not consider dynamic resource
availability. Forwarding can support service differentiation
2.2 Nimrod Requirements
Nimrod as expressed by Noel Chiappa in his early document, "A New
IP Routing and Addressing Architecture" and later in the NIMROD
Working Group documents RFC 1753 and RFC1992 established a number
of requirements that need to be considered by any new routing
architecture. The Nimrod requirements took RFC1126 as a starting
point and went further.
The goals of Nimrod, quoted from RFC1992, were as follows:
1. To support a dynamic internetwork of arbitrary size by
providing mechanisms to control the amount of routing
information that must be known throughout an internetwork.
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2. To provide service-specific routing in the presence of
multiple constraints imposed by service providers and
users.
3. To admit incremental deployment throughout an internetwork.
It is certain that these goals remain as requirements for any new
domain routing architecture.
As discussed in other sections of this document the amount
of information needed to maintain the routing system is
growing at a rate that does not scale. And yet, as the
services and constraints upon those services grow there is a
need for more information to be maintained by the routing
system.
One of the key terms in the first requirements is `control'.
While increasing amounts of information need to be known and
maintained in the Internet, the amounts and kinds on
information that are distributed can be controlled.
This goal will be reflected in the requirements for the
future domain architecture.
If anything, the demand for specific services in the
internet has grown since 1996 when the Nimrod architecture
was published. Additionally the kinds of constraints that
service providers need to impose upon their networks and
that services need to impose upon the routing have also
increased. There have been no changes to the network in the
last half decade that have improved this situation any.
This is still a absolute necessity. It is impossible to
imagine that a new routing architecture could supplant the
current architecture on a flag day. Instead any new
architecture will need to be able to incrementally deploy
within the Internet.
At one point in time Nimrod, with its addressing and routing
architectures was seen as a candidate for IPng. History shows
that it was not accepted as the IPng. The reason offered are
various.
Instead IPv6 has been put forth as the IPng. Without entering a
discussion of the relative merits of IPv6 versus Nimrod, it is
apparent that IPv6, while it may solve many problems, does not
solve the critical routing problems in the Internet today. In
fact in some sense it exacerbates them by adding a requirements
for support of two internet protocols and their respective
addressing methods. In many ways the addition of IPv6 to the mix
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of methods in today's Internet only points to the fact that the
goals, as set forth by the Nimrod team, remain as necessary goals.
There is another sense in which study of Nimrod and its
architecture may be important to deriving a FDR. Nimrod can be
said to have two derivatives:
MPLS in that it took the notion of forwarding along well
known paths
PNNI in that it took the notion of abstracting topological
information and using that information to create
connections for traffic.
It is important to note, that whilst MPLS and PNNI borrowed ideas
from Nimrod, neither of them can be said to be an implementation
of this architecture.
2.3 PNNI
PNNI was developed under the ATM Forum's auspices as a
hierarchical route determination protocol for ATM, a connection
oriented architecture. It is reputed to have developed several of
it methods from a study of the Nimrod architecture. What can be
gained from an analysis of what and did not succeed in PNNI?
The PNNI protocol includes the assumption that all peer groups are
willing to cooperate, and that the entire network is under the
same top administration. Are there limitations that stem from this
`world node' presupposition?
Additionally PNNI is not designed to support a single standardised
"SPF" algorithm that must be present in all routers. Instead it
relies on the entry node to compute a constraint-based path. It
also relies on topological maps that presented an abstracted view
of one network to another. What were the results of this
abstraction and source based route calculation mechanism?
Since the authors of this document do not have experience running
a PNNI network, the comments above are from a theoretical
perspective. Information on these issues, and any other relevant
issues, is solicited from those who do have such operational
experience
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3. Existing problems of BGP and the current EGP/IGP Architecture
Although most of the people who have to work with BGP today
believe it to be a useful, working protocol, discussions have
brought to light a number of areas where BGP or the relationship
between BGP and the IGPs in use today could be improved. This
section is, to a large extent, a wish list for the FDR based on
those areas where BGP is seen to be lacking, rather than simply a
list of problems with BGP. The shortcomings of today's inter-
domain routing system have also been extensively surveyed in
`Architectural Requirements for Inter-Domain Routing in the
Internet' [13], particularly with respect to its stability and the
problems produced by explosions in the size of the Internet.
3.1 BGP and Auto-aggregation
The stability and later linear growth rates of the number of
routing objects (prefices) that was achieved by the introduction
of CIDR around 1994, has now been once again been replaced by
near-exponential growth of number of routing objects. The
granularity of many of the objects advertised in the DFZ is very
small (prefix length of 22 or longer): This granularity appears
to be a by-product of attempts to perform precision traffic
engineering related to increasing levels of multi-homing. At
present there is no mechanism in BGP that would allow an AS to
aggregate such prefices without advance knowledge of their
existence, even if it was possible to deduce automatically that
they could be aggregated. Achieving satisfactory auto-aggregation
would also significantly reduce the non-locality problems
associated with instability in peripheral ASs.
3.2 Convergence and Recovery Issues
BGP today is a stable protocol under most circumstances but this
has been achieved at the expense of making the convergence time of
the inter-domain routing system very slow under some conditions.
This has a detrimental effect on the recovery of the network from
failures.
The timers that control the behavior of BGP are typically set to
values in the region of several tens of seconds to a few minutes,
which constrains the responsiveness of BGP to failure conditions.
In the early days of deployment of BGP, poor network stability and
router software problems lead to storms of withdrawals closely
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followed by re-advertisements of many prefices. To control the
load on routing software imposed by these `route flaps', route
flap damping was introduced into BGP. Most operators have now
implemented a degree of route flap damping in their deployments of
BGP. This restricts the number of times that the routing tables
will be rebuilt even if a route is going up and down very
frequently. Unfortunately, the effect of route flap damping is
exponential in its behavior which can result in some parts of the
Internet being inaccessible for hours at a time.
There is evidence ( [13] and our own measurements) that in today's
network route flap is disproportionately associated with the fine
grain prefices (length 22 or longer) associated with traffic
engineering at the periphery of the network. Auto-aggregation as
previously discussed would tend to mask such instability and
prevent it being propagated across the whole network.
3.3 Non-locality of Effects of Instability and Misconfiguration
There have been a number of instances, some of which are well-
documented (e.g. The April 1997 incident when misconfiguration of
BGP at a small company in Virginia, USA, turned the company into a
traffic magnet for much of the traffic in the Internet resulting
in global problems until it was fixed) of a mistake in BGP
configuration in a single peripheral AS propagating across the
whole Internet and resulting in misrouting of most of the traffic
in the Internet.
Similarly, route flap in a single peripheral AS can require route
table recalculation across the entire Internet.
This non-locality of effects is highly undesirable, and it would
be a considerable improvement if such effects were naturally
limited to a small area of the network around the problem.
3.4 Multihoming Issues
As discussed previously, the increasing use of multi-homing as a
robustness technique by peripheral ASs requires that multiple
routes have to be advertised for such domains. These routes must
not be aggregated close in to the multi-homed domain as this would
defeat the traffic engineering implied by multi-homing and
currently cannot be aggregated further away from the multi-homed
domain due to the lack of auto-aggregation capabilities.
Consequentially the DFZ routing table is growing exponentially
again.
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The longest prefix match routing technique introduced by CIDR, and
implemented in BGP4, when combined with provider address
allocation is an obstacle to effective multi-homing if load
sharing across the multiple links is required: If an AS has been
allocated its addresses from an upstream provider, the upstream
provider can aggregate those addresses with those of other
customers and need only advertise a single prefix for a range of
customers. But, if the customer AS is also connected to another
provider, the second provider is not able to aggregate the
customer addresses because they are not taken from his allocation,
and will therefore have to announce a more specific route to the
customer AS. The longest match rule will then direct all traffic
through the second provider which is not as required.
Example:
AS3 has received its addresses from AS1, which means AS1 can
Aggregate. But if AS3 want its traffic to be seen
equally both ways, AS1 is forced to announce both the
aggregate and the more specific route to AS3.
\ /
AS1 AS2
\ /
AS3
This problem has induced many ASs to apply for their own address
allocation even though they could have been allocated from an
upstream provider further exacerbating the DFZ route table size
explosion. This problem also interferes with the desire of many
providers in the DFZ to route only prefixes which are equal to or
shorter than 20 or 19 bits.
3.5 AS-number exhaustion
The domain identifier or AS-number is a 16-bit number. Allocation
of AS-numbers is currently increasing 51% p.a. [13] with the
result that exhaustion is likely around 2005. The IETF is
currently studying proposals to increase the available range of
AS-numbers to 32 bits, but this will present a deployment
challenge during transition.
3.6 Partitioned AS's
BGP is unable to handle an AS which has been split into two or
more unconnected pieces. One school of opinion is that this is
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appropriate behaviour and should not be changed: The view is that
responsibility for maintaining connectivity within the AS should
belong solely to the administrators of the domain. On the other
hand, improving the robustness of the FDR may necessitate solving
this problem, particularly as multi-homing becomes increasingly
prevalent.
3.7 Load Sharing
Load splitting or sharing was not a goal of the original designers
of BGP and it is now a problem for today's network designers and
managers. Trying to fool BGP into load sharing between several
links is a constantly recurring exercise for most operators today.
Traffic engineering extensions to the FDR which will facilitate
load sharing are essential.
3.8 Hold down issues
As with the interval between `hello' messages in OSPF, the typical
size and defined granularity (seconds to tens of seconds) of the
`hold down' time negotiated at start-up for each BGP connection
constrains the responsiveness of BGP to link failures.
The recommended values and the available lower limit for this
timer were set to limit the overhead caused by keep-alive messages
when link bandwidths were typically much lower than today.
Analysis and experiment ([14], [15]) indicate that faster links
could sustain a much higher rate of keep-alive messages without
significantly impacting normal data traffic. This would improve
BGP's responsiveness to link and node failures but with a
corresponding increase in the risk of instability, if the error
characteristics of the link are not taken properly into account
when setting the hold-down interval.
An additional problem with the hold-down mechanism in BGP is the
amount of information that has to be exchanged to re-establish the
database of route advertisements on each side of the link when it
is re-established after a failure. Currently any failure, however
brief forces a full exchange which could perhaps be constrained by
retaining some state across limited time failures and using
revision control, transaction and replication techniques to re-
synchonise the databases. Proprietary techniques have been
implemented to try to reduce this problem.
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3.9 Interaction between Inter domain routing and intra domain
routing
Today, many operators' backbone routers run both I-BGP and an IGP
maintain the routes that reach between the borders of the domain.
Exporting routes from BGP into IGP and bringing them back up to
BGP is not recommended [29], but it is still necessary for all
backbone routers to run both protocols. BGP is used to find the
egress point and IGP to find the path (next hop router) to the
egress point across the domain. This is not only a management
problem but may also create other problems:
- BGP is a distance vector protocol, as compared with most IGPs
which are link state protocols, and as such it is not optimised
for convergence.
- The metrics used in BGP and the IGP are rarely comparable or
combinable.
- Policy control in BGP is designed for simple policies between
operators, not for controlling paths within a domain.
- If all paths between two border routers have been lost, and
this is known by the IGP this may not always be used in BGP.
Instead the border router may wait until the logical connection
between the borders has been lost, and first at this point
declare the destinations as unreachable.
- Synchronization between IGP and EGP is a problem as long as we
use different protocols for IGP and EGP, which will most
probably be the case even in the future because of the
differing requirements in the two situations. Some sort of
synchronization between those two protocols would be useful.
The draft `OSPF Transient Blackhole Avoidance' [22], the IGP
side of the story is covered.
- Synchronizing in BGP means waiting for the IGP to know about
the same networks as the EGP, which can take a significant
period of time and slows down the convergence of BGP by adding
the IGP convergence time into each cycle.
3.10 Policy Issues
There are several classes of issue with current BGP policy:
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Policy is installed in an ad-hoc manner in each autonomous
system. There isn't a method for ensuring that the policy
installed in one router is coherent with policies installed
in other routers.
As described in Griffin [12] and in McPherson [20] it is
possible to install policies in routers that will cause
routing loops and will never converge in certain types of
topology
There is no available network model for describing policy in
a coherent manner.
Policy management is extremely complex and mostly done without the
aid of any automated procedures. The extreme complexity means
that highly qualified specialist are required for policy
management of border routers. The training of these specialists is
quite lengthy and needs to involve long periods of hands-on
experience. There is, therefore, a shortage of qualified staff
for installing and maintaining the routing policies.
3.11 Security Issues
While many of the issues with BPG security have been traced either
to implementation issues or to operational issues, BGP is
vulnerable to DDOS attacks. Additionally routers can be used as
unwitting forwarders in DDOS attacks on other systems.
Though DDOS attacks can be fought in a variety of ways, most
filtering methods, it is takes constant vigilance. There is
nothing in the current architecture or in the protocols that
serves to protect the forwarders from these attacks.
3.12 Support of MPLS and VPNS
Recently BGP has been modified to function as a signalling
protocol for MPLS and for VPNs [16]. This over-loading of the
BGP protocol is seen as a boon by some and as a problem by others.
While it was certainly convenient as a vehicle for vendors to
deliver extra functionality for to their products, it has
exacerbated some of the performance and complexity issues of BGP.
An ISP that is providing VPN service needs to distribute VPN
specific state to the provider edge (PE) nodes involved in each
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VPN (core nodes, i.e. ISP's nodes that are not PE nodes, do not
need the VPN specific state). Specifically, each PE node
participating in VPN X must distribute a VPN Tunnel Object to
every other PE node in VPN X . The VPN Tunnel Object includes the
originating PE's Router ID, the VPN's identifier X, a VPN Tunnel
identifier, e.g. a label, and either the VPN destinations that are
reachable using that tunnel or the virtual Router ID of a VPN
specific virtual router that is reachable via the tunnel.
A PE node must distribute VPN Tunnel Objects pertaining to VPN X
through the ISPs network to every other PE Nodes participating in
VPN X. In one proposal, an ISPs IBGP system is used for this
distribution. The proposal requires scaleability in the number of
PEs, VPNs and therefore VPN Tunnel Objects and so recommends the
use of Route Reflectors within the IBGP system. In this
application, BGP fails to meet the applications requirements in
several ways: for example, delivery of the VPN Tunnel Objects to
the appropriate PE Nodes is unreliable (a RR cannot guarantee
propagation of BGP routes) and no confirmation of delivery is
given. Since BGP has no notion of end-to-end messages, reliability
and acknowledgements will not be possible. Additionally, the RRs
are burdened with storing the locally irrelevant VPN Tunnel
Objects' data in their RIBs. The RRs' RIB sizes then adversely
affects processing of IBGP updates containing the VPN Tunnel
Objects. In a final, typically BGP example, these two problems
multiply each other: for reduced unreliability, a PE may attach to
two different RRs which leads to a four times increase in RR RIB
sizes and the number of updates a RR must process.
In creating the future domain routing architecture, serious
consideration must be given to the argument that VPN signalling
protocols should remain separate from the route determination
protocols.
3.13 IPv4 / IPv6 Ships in the Night
The fact that service providers would need to maintain two
completely separate networks; one for IPv4 and one for IPv6 has
been a real hindrance to the introduction of IPv6. Even if IPv6
does get deployed it will do so without causing the disappearance
of IPv4. This means that unless something is done, service
providers would need to maintain the two networks in perpetuity.
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3.14 Existing Tools to Support Effective Deployment of Inter-Domain
Routing
3.14.1 Routing Policy Specification Language RPSL (RFC 2622, 2650)
and RIPE NCC Database (RIPE 157)
Routing Policy Specification Language RPSL enables a network
operator to describe routes, routers and autonomous systems ASs
that are connected to the local AS.
Using the RPSL language a distributed database is created to
describe routing policies in the Internet as described by each AS
independently. The database can be used to check the consistency
of routing policies stored in the database.
Tools exist (RIPE 81, 181, 103) that can be applied on the
database to answer requests of the form, e.g.
- flag when two neighboring network operators specify conflicting
or inconsistent routing information exchanges with each other
and also detect global inconsistencies where possible;
- extract all AS-paths between two networks which are allowed by
routing policy from the routing policy database; display the
connectivity a given network has according to current policies.
The database queries enable a partial static solution to the
convergence problem. They analyze routing policies of very limited
part of Internet and verify that they do not contain conflicts
that could lead to protocol divergence. The static analysis of
convergence of the entire system has exponential time complexity,
so approximation algorithms would have to be used.
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4. Expected Users
This section addresses the question of the target audience of the
FDR both in terms of organizations that might own networks which
would use FDR and the human users who will have to interact with
the FDR>
4.1 Organisations
The organizations that own networks connected to the Internet have
become much more diverse since RFC1126 [4] was published. In
particular a major part of the network is now owned by commercial
service provider organizations in the business of making profits
from carrying data traffic.
4.1.1 Commercial Service Providers
The routing system must take into account their desires for
commercial secrecy and security, as well as allowing them to
organize their business as flexibly as possible.
Service providers will often wish to conceal the details of the
network from other connected networks. So far as is possible, the
routing system should not require the service providers to expose
more details of the topology and capability of their networks than
is strictly necessary.
Many service providers will also offer contracts to their
customers in the form of Service Level Agreements (SLAs) and the
routing system must allow the providers to support these SLAs
through traffic engineering and load balancing as well as
multihoming allowing them to achieve the degree of resilience and
robustness that they need.
Service providers can be categorized as
Global Service Providers (GSPs) with networks which have a
global reach. Such providers may and usually will wish to
constrain traffic between their customers to run entirely on
their networks. Such providers will interchange traffic at
multiple peering points with other GSPs and need extensive
policy-based controls to control the interchange of traffic.
Peering may be through the use of dedicated private lines
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between the partners or increasingly through Internet
Exchange Points.
National Service Providers (NSPs)which are similar to GSPs
but typically cover one country. Such organizations may
operate as a federation which provides similar reach to a
GSP and may wish to be able to steer traffic preferentially
to other federation members to achieve global reach.
Local Internet Service Providers (ISPs) operate regionally
and will typically purchase transit capacity from NSPs or
GSPs to provide global connectivity, but may also peer with
neighbouring ISPs.
The routing system should be sufficiently flexible to accommodate
the continually changing business relationships of the providers.
4.1.2 Enterprises
The leaves of the network domain graph are in many cases networks
supporting a single enterprise. Such networks cover an enormous
range of complexity with some multi-national companies owning
networks which rival the complexity and reach of a GSP whereas
many fall into the Small Office-Home Office (SOHO) category. The
routing system should allow simple and robust configuration and
operation for the SOHO category, whilst effectively supporting the
larger enterprise.
Enterprises are particularly likely to lack the capability to
configure and manage a complex routing system and every effort
should be made to provide simple configuration and operation for
such networks.
Enterprises will also wish to be able to change their service
provider with ease.
Enterprises will wish to be able to multihome to one or more
providers to provide robustness.
4.1.3 Domestic Networks
Increasingly domestic networks are likely to be `always on' and
will resemble SOHO enterprises networks with no special
requirements of the routing system.
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In the meantime, the routing system must support dial-up users.
4.1.4 Internet Exchange Points
Peering of service providers, academic networks and larger
enterprises is increasingly happening at specific Internet
Exchange Points where many networks are linked together in a
relatively small physical area. The resources of the exchange may
be owned by a broker or jointly by the connecting networks. The
routing systems should support such exchange points without
requiring the exchange point to either operate as a superior
entity with every connected network logically inferior to it or
requiring the exchange point to be a member of one (or all)
connected networks.
4.1.5 Content Providers
Content providers are at one level a special class of enterprise,
but the desire to deliver content efficiently means that a content
provider may provide multiple replicated origin servers or caches
across a network. The routing system should facilitate delivering
content from the most efficient location.
4.2 Human Users
This section covers the most important human users of the FDR and
their expected interactions with the system.
4.2.1 Network Planners
The routing system should allow them to plan and implement a
network which can be proved to be stable and will meet their
traffic engineering requirements.
4.2.2 Network Operators
The routing system should, so far as is possible, be simple to
configure and operate, behave in a predictable, stable fashion and
deliver appropriate statistics and events to allow the network to
be managed and upgraded in an efficient and timely fashion.
4.2.3 Mobile End Users
The routing system must support mobile end users.
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5. Mandated Constraints
While many of the requirement to which the protocol must respond
are technical, some aren't. These mandated constraints are those
that are determined by conditions of the world around us.
Understanding these requirements requires and analysis of the
world in which these systems will be deployed,. The constraints
include those that are determined by:
Environmental factors.
Geography
Political boundaries and considerations
Technological factors such as the prevalence of different
levels of technology in the developed world as opposed to
in the developing or undeveloped world.
5.1 The Federated Environment
The graph of the Internet network with routers and other control
boxes at the nodes and communication links along the edges is
today partitioned administratively into a large number of disjoint
domains, known as Autonomous Systems (ASs).
A common administration may have responsibility for one or more
domains which may or may not be adjacent in the graph.
Commercial and policy constraints affecting the routing system
will typically be exercised at the boundaries of these domains
where traffic is exchanged between domains.
The perceived need for commercial confidentiality will seek to
minimise the information transferred across these boundaries,
leading to requirements for aggregated information, abstracted
maps of connectivity exported from domains and mistrust of
supplied information.
One possible extension to the requirements would be to require
the protocols to provide the ability for groups of peering domains
to be treated as a (super-)domain. These domains would have a
common administrative policy.
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5.2 Working with different sorts of network
The diverse Layer 2 networks over which the layer 3 routing system
is implemented have typically been operated totally independently
from the layer 3 network. Consideration needs to be given to the
degree and nature of leakage of information between the layers
that is desirable. In particular, the desire for robustness
through diverse routing implies knowledge of the underlying
networks to be able to guarantee the robustness
Mobile access networks may also impose extra requirements on Layer
3 routing.
5.3 Delivering Diversity
The routing system is operating at Layer 3 in the network. To
achieve robustness and resilience at this layer requires that
where multiple diverse routes are employed as part of delivering
the resilience, the routing system at Layer 3 needs to be assured
that the Layer 2 and lower routes are really diverse. The
`diamond problem' is the simplest form of this problem ¡ layer 3
provider attempting to provide diversity buys layer 2 services
from two separate providers who in turn buy wayleaves from the
same provider:
Layer 3 service
/ \
/ \
Layer 2 Layer 2
Provider A Provider B
\ /
\ /
Trench provider
Now when the backhoe cuts the trench, the Layer 3 provider has no
resilience unless he had taken special steps to verify that the
trench wasn't common. The routing system should facilitate
avoidance of this kind of trap.
5.4 When will the new solution be required?
There is a full range of opinion on this subject. An informal
survey indicates that the range varies from 2 years to 6 years.
And while there are those, possibly outliers, who think there is
no need for a new routing architecture as well as those who think
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a new architecture was need years ago, the median seems to lie at
around 4 years. As in all projections of the future this is
largely not provable.
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6. Assumptions
The assumptions so far in the work to derive the requirements for
the Future Routing Domain have been:
1. The number of hosts today is somewhere in the area of 100
Million. With dial in and NATs this is likely to turn into up
to 500 Million users (see [30]). In a number of years, with
wireless accesses and different gizmos attaching to the
Internet, we are likely to see a couple of Billion users on
the Internet. The number of globally addressable hosts is very
much dependent on how common NATs will be in the future.
2. NATs exist and we cannot assume that NATs will cease being a
presence in the networks.
3. The number of operators in the Internet will probably not grow
very much, as there is a likelihood that operators will tend to
merge. However, as Internet-connectivity expands to new
countries, new operators will emerge and then merge again.
4. Today, there are around 9,500 AS's with a growth rate of around
51% per annum [13]. With current use of AS's (for e.g., multi-
homing) the number of AS's grow to 70,000 within 3 - 5 years.
5. In contrast to the number of operators, the number of domains
is likely to grow significantly. Today, each operator has
different domains within an AS, but this also shows in SLAs and
policies internal to the operator. Making this globally visible
would create a number of domains 10-100 times the amount of
ASs, i.e., between 100,000 and 1,000,000.
6. With more and more capacity at the edge of the network the IP
network will expand. Today there are operators with several
thousands of routers, but this is likely to be increased. A
domain will probably contain tens of thousands of routers.
7. The speed of connections in the (fixed) access will technically
be (almost) unconstrained. However, the cost for the links will
not be negligible so that the apparent speed will be
effectively bounded. Within a number of years some will have
Gigabit-speed in the access.
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8. At the same time, the bandwidth of wireless access still has a
strict upper-bound. Within the foreseeable future each user
will only have a tiny amount of resources available compared to
fixed accesses (10kbps to 2Mbps with only a few achieving the
higher figure).
9. Assumptions 7 and 8 taken together suggest a span of bandwidth
between 10 kbps to 1000 Mbps.
10. The speed in the backbone has grown rapidly, and there is
no evidence that the growth will stop in the coming years.
Terabit-speed is likely to be the minimum backbone speed in a
couple of years.
11. There have been discussions as to whether Moore's law will
continue to hold for processor speed. If Moore's law does not
hold, then communication circuits might play a more important
role in the future. Also, optical routing is based on circuit
technology which is the main reason for taking ³circuits³ into
account when designing an FDR.
12. However, the datagram model still remains the fundamental
model for the Internet.
13. The number of peering points in the network is likely to
grow, as multi-homing becomes important. Also traffic will
become more locally distributed, which will drive the demand
for local peering.
14. The FDR will achieve the same degree of ubiquity as the
current Internet and IP routing.
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7. Functional Requirements
This section includes a detailed discussion of new requirements
for a future domain routing architecture. As discussed in section
2.1 a new architecture must build upon the requirements for past
routing architecture. For that reason, the requirements discussed
in section 2.1 are not repeated here. In case where the
requirement has changed significantly, was omitted from the
discussions in RFC1126 or were treated as non-goals in RFC1126 but
may now be significant, it will be discussed in further detail I
this section.Topology
7.1.1 The same topology information should support different path
selection ideas:
The same topology information need to provide a more flexible
spectrum of path selection methods that we might expect to find in
a future Internet, including, amongst others, both distributed
techniques such as hop by hop, shortest path, local optimization
constraint-based, class of service, source address routing, and
destination address routing as well as the centralized, global
optimization constraint-based `traffic engineering' type (Open
constraints should be allowed). Allowing different path selection
techniques to be used will produce a much more predictable and
comprehensible result than the `clever tricks' which are currently
needed to achieve the same results. Traffic engineering functions
need to be combined.
Routers need to know the domain topology. BGP today operates with
a policy database, but does not provide a link state database for
the connectivity of each AS ¡ the extent to which this is feasible
or desirable needs to be investigated.
7.1.2 Separation between the routing information topology from the
data transport topology.
The controlling network should be logically separate from the
controlled network. Physically, the two functional "planes" can
reside in the same nodes and share the same links, but this is not
the only possibility. Other options can also be feasible, and may
sometimes be necessary. An example is a pure circuit switch (that
cannot see individual IP packets), combined with an external
controller. Another example may be where there are multiple links
between two routers, and all the links are used for data
forwarding, but only one is used for carrying the routing session.
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7.2 Distribution
7.2.1 Distribution mechanisms
The important requirement is that every entity gets the
information it needs in a fast, reliable, and trusted way.
Possible distribution mechanisms for routing information exchange
may be for example full mesh, route reflections, flooding, and
multicast.
The current I-BGP seems to have unnecessary limitations in this
respect, where a router requires full mesh to obtain all available
routes. Route reflection avoids the need of full meshes but loses
information since the route reflector chooses the best route for
all the other routers. This best route might be different if all
routers do the selection themselves in a full mesh.
7.2.2 Path advertisement
The inter-domain routing system must be able to advertise more
kinds of information than just connectivity and AS path. The FDR
should support the Service Level Specifications (SLSs) that are
being developed under the Differentiated Services imprimatur.
Examples of such additional information can be:
- QoS information
To allow an ISP to sell predictable end-to-end QoS service to any
destination, the routing system should have information about the
end-to-end QoS. This means that the routing system should be able
to support different paths for different DSCP's or TOS-values. The
outing system should also be able to carry information about the
expected (or actually, promised) characteristics of the entire
path and also the price for the service. (If such information is
exchanged at all between network operators today, it is through
bilateral management interfaces, and not through the routing
protocols.)
This would allow for the operator to optimise the choice of path
based on a price/performance trade-off.
It is possible that providing dynamic QoS information to control
routing is not scalable, and an alternative would be to use static
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class-of-service information such as is suggested in the
Differentiated Services work.
- security information
Security characteristics of other ASs (in the path or in the map)
can allow the routing entity to choose routing decision based on
some political reasons. The information itself is assumed to be so
secure that you can trust it.
- usage and cost information
This can be used for billing and traffic engineering purpose. In
order to support cost based routing policies for customers (ie
peer ISPs), information such as "traffic on this link or path
costs XXX USD per Gigabyte" needs to be advertised, so that the
customer can choose a cheap or an expensive route from an economic
perspective.
- monitored performance
Some performance information such as delay and drop frequency can
be carried. (This is may only be suitable inside a domain.). This
should support at least the kind of delay bound contractual terms
that are currently being offered by service providers.
7.2.3 Stability of Routing Information
7.2.3.1 Avoiding Routing Oscillations
The FDR should seek to minimize oscillations in route
advertisements.
7.2.3.2 Providing Loop Free Routing and Forwarding
In line with the separation of concerns of routing and forwarding,
the distribution of routing information should be, so far as is
possible, loop-free, and the forwarding information created from
this routing information should also seek to minimize loops in the
data forwarding paths.
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7.3 Addressing
7.3.1 Support mix of IPv4 and IPv6 addresses and other types of
addresses too
The routing system must support a mix of different kinds of
addresses, including at least IPv4 and IPv6 addresses, and
preferably various types of non-IP addresses too. For instance
networks like SDH/SONET and WDM may prefer to use non-IP
addresses.
7.3.2 Support for domain renumbering
The routing system must support renumbering (when a new prefix is
given to an old network, and the change is known in advance).
7.3.3 Multicast and Anycast
The routing system must support multicast addressing, both within
a domain and across multiple domains. It also needs to support
anycast addressing within a domain, and inter-domain anycast
addressing should preferably not be excluded.
7.3.4 Address scoping
The routing system must support scoping of addresses, for each of
the unicast, multicast, and anycast types.
For unicast address scoping as of IPv6, there seems to be no
special problems with respect to routing. Inter-domain routing
handles only global addresses, while intra-domain routing also
needs to be aware of site-local addresses. Link-local addresses
are never routed at all.
For scoping in a more general sense, and for scoping of multicast
and anycast addresses, more study may be needed to identify the
requirements.
7.3.5 Mobility Support
The routing system shall support end system mobility (and
movability, and portability, whatever the differences may be).
We observe that the existing solutions based on re-numbering
and/ortunneling are designed to work with the current routing, so
they do not add any new requirements to future routing. But the
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requirement is general, and future solutions may not be restricted
to the ones we have today.
7.4 Management Requirements
7.4.1 Simple policy management
- Less manual configuration than today
- Operators/providers want easy handling, but cannot afford to
lose control.
- All the information should be available
- But should not be visible except for when desired.
- Advertise policy (not only the result of policy)
- Policy conflict Resolution
(e g one would like to have one default behavior, and
possibilities to choose other options. But much of this depends
on implementation, and not on the protocols)
7.5 Mathematical Provability
The protocol is required to be resistant to bad routing policy
decisions made by operators. Tools are needed to check
compatibility of routing policies. Routing policies are compatible
if their global interaction does not cause divergence (collection
of ASes exchange routing messages indefinitely never entering a
stable state). Tools must be provided to make routing system
convergent. A routing system is convergent if after an exchange of
routing information, routing tables reach a stable state that does
not change until routing policies change.
To achieve the above mentioned goals a mechanism is needed to
publish and communicate policies so that operational coordination
and fault isolation is possible. Tools are required that verify
stable properties routing system in specified parts of Internet.
The tools should be efficient (fast) and have a broad scope of
operation (check large portions of Internet).
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Tools analyzing routing policies can be applied statically or
(preferably) dynamically. Dynamic solution requires tools that can
be used for run time checking for a source of oscillations that
arise from policy conflicts. Research is needed to prove that
there is an efficient solution to the dynamic checking of
oscillations.
7.6 Traffic Engineering
7.6.1 Load Balancing (ECMP/OMP)
The routing system shall support the controlled distribution over
multiple links or paths, of traffic towards the same destination.
This applies to domains with two or more connections to the same
neighbor domain, and to domains with connections to more than one
neighbor domain. Load balancing can be both static and dynamic.
In intra-domain routing, the metric needs to contain more
properties of the link such as delay, loss and utilization, to
construct multiple paths and split load.
7.6.2 Peering support
The FDR must support peer¡level connectivity as well as purely
hierarchical inter-domain connections. The network is becoming
increasingly complex with private peering arrangements set up
between providers at every level of the hierarchy of service
providers and even by certain large enterprises, in the form of
dedicated extranets.
The FDR must facilitate traffic engineering of these peer routes
so that the network operators can make optimal use of the
available connectivity.
7.7 Multi-homing support
An FDR protocol must support multi-homing, i.e. support an AS to
peer with several other domains.
As soon as a domain is multi-homed its prefixes are generally hard
to aggregate as they are advertised further away from the
multihomed domain, even if a domain is allotted a group of
prefixes by a provider domain. As described above, multi-homing is
leading to explosion of the size of the routing tables in the DFZ.
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The rapid growth of the size of the routing tables has to be
solved by one means or another. This may be achieved by forcing
domains to aggregate more, by a form of auto-aggregation or by
looking at a new routing architecture.
7.7.1 Support for NATs
One of our assumptions is that NATs are here to stay. The FDR
should seek to work with NATs to aid in bi-directional
connectivity through the NAT without compromising the additional
opacity and privacy which the NAT offers. This problem is closely
analogous to the abstraction problem which is already under
discussion for the interchange of routing information between
domains.
7.8 Statistics support
Both the routing and forwarding parts of the FDR must maintain
statistical information about the performance of their functions.
This may be an extended version of the MIBs provided for IP
forwarding, BGP and the relevant IGP.
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8. Performance Requirements
Over the past several years, the perfomance of the routing system
has frequently been discussed. Some of the questions being asked
include:
- How fast does an AS converge? How fast must domains converge?
- How big are the Areas, the ASs? How big should domains be?
- How much or how little data may be transferred in a routing
message?
- How much state can be stored and processed in route control
processors.
- Measures of network availability
- Measure of network reliability
- Global and Local measures of network Stability
- Capacity Measurement
In many cases there has been very little data or statistical evidence
for many of the performance claims being made. In recent years
several efforts have been initiated to gather data and do the
analyses required to make scientific assessments of the performance
issues and requirements. In order to complete this section of the
requirements analysis, the data and analyses from these studies needs
to be gathered and collated into this document. This work has been
started but has yet to be completed.
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9. Backwards compatibility (cutover) and Maintainability
This area poses a dilemma. On one hand it is an absolute
requirements that introduction of FDR not require any flag days.
The network currently in place has to keep running at least as
well as it does now while the new network is being brought in
around it.
However, at the same time, it is also an absolute requirement that
the new architecture not be limited by the restrictions that
plague today's network. Thos restrictions cannot be allow to
become permanent baggage on the new architecture. If they do, the
effort to create a new system will come to naught.
These two requirements have significance not only for the
transition strategy, but for the architecture itself since the
determine that it must be possible for an internet such as today's
BGP controlled network, or one of its ASs, can exist as a domain
within the FDR.
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10. Security Requirements
It must be possible to secure the routing communication: the
communicating entities shall be able to identify who sent and who
received the information (authentication), and verify that the
information has not been changed on the way (integrity).
Security is more important in inter-domain routing where the
operator has no control to the other domains, and less serious in
intra-domain routing since all the links and the nodes are under
the administration of the operator and can be expected to share a
trust relationship.
The routing communication mechanism shall be robust against
denial-of-service attacks.
Should we also require:
- that no one else but the intended recipient can access
(privacy) or understand (confidentiality) the information?
- possibility to verify that all the information has been
received (non-repudiation)?
Is there a need to separate security of routing from security of
forwarding?
Securing the BGP session, as done today, only secures the exchange
of messages from the peering AS, not the content of the
information. In other words, we can confirm that the information
we got is what our neighbor really sent us, but we do not know if
this information (that originated in some remote AS) is true or
not.
Is it enough to rely on chains of trust (we trust our peers who
trust their peers who..), or do we also need authentication and
integrity of the information end-to-end?
The FDR should seek to cooperate with the security policies of
firewalls whenever possible. This is likely to involve further
requirements for abstraction of information, as the firewall is
seeking to minimize interchange of information which could lead to
a security breach.
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11. Open Issues
This section covers issues that need to considered and resolved in
deciding on a future domain routing architecture. While they
can't be described as requirements, they do affect the types of
solution that are acceptable. The discussions included below are
very open-ended.
11.1 System Modeling
It is still a new assumption that object modeling of a system is
an essential first step to creating a new system. Frequently the
effort to object model becomes an end in itself and does not lead
to system creation. But there is a balance and a lot that can be
discovered in an ongoing effort to model a system such as the
future domain routing system.
It is recommended that this process be included in the
requirements. It should not, however be a gating event to all
other work.
Some of the most important realizations will occur during the
process of determining the following:
- Object classification
- Relationships and containment
- Roles and Rules
11.2 Advantages and Disadvantages of having the same
protocols for EGP and IGP
Inter-domain and intra-domain routing have different targets and
business assumptions. An IGP figures out how each node in the
network gets to every other node in the network in the most
optimal way. In this context the word optimal refers to the cost
of the path measured by metrics associated with each link in the
network. The area of network infrastructure (primarily routers)
over which an IGP runs is typically under the same technical and
administrative control, and it defines the boundary of an AS
(Autonomous System). The purpose of an EGP is to allow two
different ASs to exchange routing information so that data traffic
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can be forwarded across the AS border. Because an AS border router
both separates and attaches two different areas of technical and
administrative control, the specifications and implementations of
EGPs include mechanisms for doing policy routing, meaning that
control can be exerted over which routing information crosses the
border between two ASs. EGPs contain features that are like
metrics in IGPs, but unlike IGPs, the function of an EGP is not
necessarily to optimize the path that data traffic takes through a
backbone. Having different protocols for EGP and IGP reflects this
difference.
However, there is increasing demand in IGP to do policy routing.
The shortest path may not be the best path in the light of the
policies. Network operators need to have more flexibility in
choosing routes for reasons such as load balancing. This means
both inter-domain routing and intra-domain routing are for the
same purpose of choosing the best route according to operators'
own policies. Having the same protocol will emphasize the need to
do policy control in IGP. This especially important since the
current IBGP is actually for intra-domain routing
This comment touches on the fact that the level of manual control
(policy) is much larger in EGP. Why is this so?
EGP:
- Manifests business relations to peers, providers and customers.
- Borders to resources outside of our control. We don't trust
others to behave well when configuring routing. These resources
are also often be less stable (eg customer access).
- Network size extremely large. This gives many updates which
means we need to have a simple calculation of paths. It also
gives an extremely large amount of information (due to the
network size) which gives the need for aggregation. Also we
need policy to protect our network from receiving bad
announcements causing our egress traffic to take the "wrong"
way and to avoid sending bad announcements attracting the
"wrong" traffic.
IGP:
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- The network resources are under our control and we trust
ourself to behave well (in a sense defined by ourselves) when
configuring routing.
- The network resources of today are fairly stable in a backbone
network.
- The size of the network is limited. So, the domain is fairly
stable which gives a limited number of updates. Limited number
of updates gives the option of using processor intensive
automation (distributed link state routing). This gives us fast
and easy to manage dynamic routing. BUT stability and
visibility issues still constrain us from going further down
the path of policy routing.
11.2.1 The necessity to clearly identify all identities related to
routing
As in all other fields, the words used to refer to concepts and to
describe operations about routing are important. Rather than
describe concepts using terms that are inaccurate or rarely used
in the real world of networking, an effort is necessitated to use
the correct words. Many networking terms are used casually, and
the result is a partial or incorrect understanding of the
underlying concept. Entities such as nodes, interfaces, sub-
networks, tunnels, and the grouping concepts such as ASs, domains,
areas, and regions, need to be clearly identified and defined to
avoid mixing from each other. And even if they are all identified
by IP numbers, the routing entities should know what kind of
entities they are.
There is also a need to separate identifiers (what or who) from
locators (where) from routes (how to reach). One of the problems
with the current BGP is if there is a topology change, the amount
of information circulated is a function of the number of IP
prefixes being routed. This is a common problem for a distance
vector protocol. If the topology information is properly separated
from addressing information in a state map, then when a link
between two ASs goes down, this is the only information which
needs to be advertised, instead of advertising the inability to
reach some network prefixes. This example shows the need to
separate end node identifiers from routing information.
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11.2.2 Map distribution and/or route Distribution
11.2.2.1 Map Abstraction
If every detail is advertised throughout the Internet, there will
be a lot of information. Scalable solutions requires abstraction.
- If we summarise too much, some information will be lost on the
way.
- If we summarize too little, then more information then required
is available contributing to scaling limitations.
- One can allow more summarisation, if there also is a mechanism
to query for more details within policy limits.
- The basic requirement is not that the information shall be
advertised, but that the information shall be available to
those who need it. (We should not presuppose a solution where
advertising is the only possible mechanism.
11.2.3 Robustness and redundancy:
The routing association between two domains should survive even if
some individual connection between two ASBR routers goes down.
The "session" should operate between logical "routing entities" on
each domain side, and not necessarily be bound to individual
routers or IP addresses. Such a logical entity can be physically
distributed over multiple network elements. Or it can reside in a
single router, which would default to the current situation.
11.2.4 Hierarchy
A more flexible hierarchy with more levels and recursive groupings
in both upward and downward directions allows more structured
routing. So that no single level will get too big for routers to
handle.
Note that groupings can look different depending on which aspect
we use to define them. A DiffServ area, a MPLS domain, a trusted
domain, a QoS area, a multicast domain, etc, do not always
coincide. And neither are they strict hierarchical subsets of each
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other. The basic distinction at each level is "this grouping
versus everything outside".
Each AS is still independent, and forms the basis for policy
decisions. However, is there a need for a higher level aggregation
which is above AS? If yes, who will be responsible for this level?
Can a network make policy decisions on such aggregated ASs without
seeing the individual ASs?
11.3 Introduction of new control mechanisms
Is it be possible to apply a control theory framework, and analyze
the stability of the control system of the whole network domain,
for e g speed and the frequency response, and then use the
results from that analysis to set the timers and other protocol
parameters.
11.4 Robustness
Is solution to the Byzantine Generals problem a requirement? What
are some of the other network robustness issues that must be
resolved.
11.5 VPN Support
Today BGP is also used for VPN and other stuff for example as
described in RFC2547
Internet routing and VPN routing have different purposes, and most
often exchange different information between different devices.
Most Internet routers do not need to know any VPN specific
information. The concepts should be clearly separated.
But when it comes to the mechanisms, VPN routing can share the
same protocol as ordinary Internet routing, it can use a separate
instance of the same protocol, or it can use a different protocol.
All variants are possible and have their own merits.
For example, all the AS Border Routers within one AS participate
in a full-mesh I-BGP process for distributing external IP routes.
At the same time a separate "VPN-routing" protocol can be
operating between all the PE routers of some "VPN provider". These
PE routers can be located in different ASs, and some of them may
also be ASBRs.
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11.6 End to End Reliability
The existing Internet architecture neither requires or provides
end-to-end reliability of control information dissemination. For
example, in distributing VPN information there is, however, a
requirement for end to end reliability of control information,
i.e. the ends of the VPN established need to have a
acknowledgement of the success in setting up the VPN. While it
is not necessarily the function of a routing architecture to
provide end-to-end reliability for this kind of purpose, we must
be clear that end-to-end reliability becomes a requirement if the
network has to support such reliable control signalling. There
may be other requirements that derive from requiring the FDR to
support reliable control signaling.
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to acknowledge the helpful comments and
suggestions of the following individuals: Loa Anderson, Tomas
Ahlstr÷m, Niklas Borg, Nigel Bragg, Krister Edlund, Owe Grafford,
Torbj÷rn Lundberg, Jasminko Mulahusic, Bernhard Stockman, Henrik
Villf÷r, Tom Worster, Roberto Zamparo,.
In addition, the authors are indebted to the folks who wrote all
the references we have consulted in putting this paper together.
This includes not only the reference explicitly listed below, but
those who contributed to the mailing lists we have been
participating in for years.
References
[1] Clark, D., "Policy Routing in Internet Protocols", RFC
1102, May 1989.
[2] Estrin, D., "Requirements for Policy Based Routing in the
Research Internet", RFC 1125, November 1989.
[3] Steenstrup, M,. "An Architecture for Inter-Domain Policy
Routing", RFC 1478, June 1993
[4] Little, M., "Goals and Functional Requirements for Inter-
Autonomous System Routing", RFC 1126, July
1989.
[5] Perlman, R., "Interconnections Second Edition", 1999,
Addison Wesley Longman, Inc.
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[6] Perlman, R., "Network Layer Protocols with Byzantine
Robust-ness", Ph.D. Thesis, Department of
Electrical Engineering and Computer Science,
MIT, August 1988.
[7] Castineyra, I., Chiappa, N., Steenstrup, M., "the Nimrod
Routing Architecture", RFC1992, Aug 1996
[8] Chiappa, N., "IPng Technical Requirements of the Nimrod
Routing and Addressing Architecture", RFC 1753,
Dec 1994
[9] Chiappa, N., "A New IP Routing and Addressing
Architecture"
[10] Wroclowski, J., The Metanet White Paper - Workshop on
Research Directions for the Next Generation
Internet, 1995
[11] Labovitz, C., Ahuja, A., Farnam J., Bose, A., Experimental
Measurement of Delayed Convergence, NANOG
[12] Griffin, T.G., Wilfong, G., An Analysis of BGP Convergence
Properties, SIGCOMM 1999
[13] Huston, G., Architectural Requirements for Inter-Domain
Routing in the Internet, Internet Draft ¡
draft-iab-bgparch-00, Feb 2001, Work in
Progress
[14] Alaettinoglu, C., Jacobson, V. and Yu, H, , Towards
Milli-Second IGP Convergence, Internet Draft -
draft-alaettinoglu-isis-convergence-00,
Nov 2000 Work in Progress
[15] Sandick, H., Squire, M., Cain, B., Duncan, I.,
Haberman, B., Fast LIveness Protocol (FLIP),
Internet Draft - draft-sandiick-flip-00,
Feb 2000, Work in Progress
[16] Rosen, E. and Rekhter, Y., BGP/MPLS VPNs, RFC2547,
March 1999
[17] Clark, D., Chapin, L., Cerf, V., Braden, R., Hobby, R.,
"towards the Future Internet Architecture",
RFC1287, December 1991
[18] Jacobson, V., Nichols, K. and Poduri, K., The `Virtual
Wire' Behavior Aggregate, Internet Draft ¡
draft-ietf-diffserv-pdb-vw-00, July 2000, Work
in Progress
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[19] Seddigh, N., Nandy, B., and Heinanen, J.,
An Assured Rate Per-Domain Behaviour for
Differentiated Services, Internet Draft -
draft-ietf-diffserv-pdb-ar-00, Feb 2001, Work
in Progress
[20] McPherson, D., Gill, V., Walton, D. and Retana, A.,
"BGP Persistent Route Oscillation Condition",
Internet Draft - draft-mcpherson-bgp-route-
oscillation-00, Dec 2000, Work in Progress
[21] Hain, T, "Architectural Implications of NAT", RFC 2993,
November 2000
[22] McPherson, D. and Przygienda, T., OSPF Transient Blackhole
Avoidance, Internet Draft - draft-mcpherson-
ospf-transient-00, July 2000 Work In Progress
[23] Thaler, D., Estrin, D. and Meyer, D. (editors), Border
Gateway Multicast Protocol (BGMP): Protocol
Specification, Internet Draft - draft-ietf-
bgmp-spec-02, Nov 2000 Work in progress
[24] Rosen E. Et al., Multiprotocol Label Switching
Architecture, RFC 3031
[25] Ashwood-Smith P. Et al., Generalized MPLS - Signaling
Functional Description, Internet Draft ¡
draft-ietf-mpls-generalized-signaling-01.txt,
Work in progress
[26] IETF Resource Allocation Protocol working group,
http://www.ietf.org/html.charters/rap-
charter.html
[27] IETF Configuration management with SNMP working group,
http://www.ietf.org/html.charters/snmpconf-
charter.html
[28] IETF Policy working group,
http://www.ietf.org/html.charters/policy-
charter.html
[29] Yu J., Scalable Routing Design Principles, RFC 2791
[30] Telcordia Technologies Netsizer web site
http://www.netsizer.com/
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Author's Addresses
Elwyn Davies
Nortel Networks
London Road
Harlow, Essex CM17 9NA, UK
Phone: +44-1279-405498
Email: elwynd@nortelnetworks.com
Avri Doria
Nortel Networks
600 Technology Park Drive
Billerica, MA
Phone: +1 978 288 6627
Email: avri@nortelnetworks.com
Malin Carlzon
Royal Institute of Technology
Network Operating Centre
KTHNOC
SE-100 44
Stockholm, Sweden
Phone: +46 70 269 6519
Email: malin@sunet.se
Anders Bergsten
Telia Research AB
Aurorum 6
S-977 75 Lulea, SWEDEN
Phone: +46 920 754 50
Email: anders.p.bergsten@telia.se
Olle Pers
Telia Research AB
Stockholm, SWEDEN
Phone: +46 8 713 8182
Email: olle.k.pers@telia.se
Yong Jiang
Telia Research AB
123 86 Farsta SWEDEN
Phone: +46 8 713 8125
Email: yong.b.jiang@telia.se
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Lenka Carr Motyckova
Div. of Computer
Lulea University of Technology
S-971 87
Lulea, SWEDEN
Phone: (+46) 920 91769
Email: lenka@sm.luth.se
Pierre Fransson
Div. of Computer
Lulea University of Technology
S-971 87
Lulea, SWEDEN
Phone: (+46) 70 646 0384
Email: pierre@cdt.luth.se
Olov Schelen
Div. of Computer
Lulea University of Technology
S-971 87
Lulea, SWEDEN
Phone: (+46) 70 536 2030
Email: Olov.Schelen@cdt.luth.se
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