IDR Working Group                                         R. Raszuk, Ed.
Internet-Draft                                              Bloomberg LP
Intended status: Standards Track                               C. Cassar
Expires: January 9, 2017                                   Cisco Systems
                                                                 E. Aman
                                                             TeliaSonera
                                                             B. Decraene
                                                            S. Litkowski
                                                                  Orange
                                                                 K. Wang
                                                        Juniper Networks
                                                            July 8, 2016


                 BGP Optimal Route Reflection (BGP-ORR)
             draft-ietf-idr-bgp-optimal-route-reflection-12

Abstract

   This document proposes a solution for BGP route reflectors to allow
   them to choose the best path their clients would have chosen under
   the same conditions, without requiring further state or any new
   features to be placed on the clients.  This facilitates, for example,
   best exit point policy (hot potato routing).  This solution is
   primarily applicable in deployments using centralized route
   reflectors.

   The solution relies upon all route reflectors learning all paths
   which are eligible for consideration.  Best path selection is
   performed in each route reflector based on a configured virtual
   location in the IGP.  The location can be the same for all clients or
   different per peer/update group or per peer.  Best path selection can
   also be performed based on user configured policies in each route
   reflector.

Status of This Memo

   This Internet-Draft is submitted in full conformance with the
   provisions of BCP 78 and BCP 79.

   Internet-Drafts are working documents of the Internet Engineering
   Task Force (IETF).  Note that other groups may also distribute
   working documents as Internet-Drafts.  The list of current Internet-
   Drafts is at http://datatracker.ietf.org/drafts/current/.

   Internet-Drafts are draft documents valid for a maximum of six months
   and may be updated, replaced, or obsoleted by other documents at any




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   time.  It is inappropriate to use Internet-Drafts as reference
   material or to cite them other than as "work in progress."

   This Internet-Draft will expire on January 9, 2017.

Copyright Notice

   Copyright (c) 2016 IETF Trust and the persons identified as the
   document authors.  All rights reserved.

   This document is subject to BCP 78 and the IETF Trust's Legal
   Provisions Relating to IETF Documents
   (http://trustee.ietf.org/license-info) in effect on the date of
   publication of this document.  Please review these documents
   carefully, as they describe your rights and restrictions with respect
   to this document.  Code Components extracted from this document must
   include Simplified BSD License text as described in Section 4.e of
   the Trust Legal Provisions and are provided without warranty as
   described in the Simplified BSD License.

Table of Contents

   1.  Definitions of Terms Used in This Memo  . . . . . . . . . . .   2
   2.  Introduction  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   3
     2.1.  Problem Statement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   3
     2.2.  Existing/Alternative Solutions  . . . . . . . . . . . . .   4
   3.  Proposed Solutions  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   5
     3.1.  Client's Perspective IGP Based Best Path Selection  . . .   6
     3.2.  Client's Perspective Policy Based Best Path Selection . .   6
     3.3.  Solution Interactions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   7
   4.  CPU and Memory Scalability  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   8
   5.  Advantages and Deployment Considerations  . . . . . . . . . .   9
   6.  Security Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   9
   7.  IANA Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  10
   8.  Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  10
   9.  References  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  10
     9.1.  Normative References  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  10
     9.2.  Informative References  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  10
   Authors' Addresses  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  11

1.  Definitions of Terms Used in This Memo

   NLRI -   Network Layer Reachability Information.

   RIB -   Routing Information Base.

   AS -   Autonomous System number.




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   VRF -   Virtual Routing and Forwarding instance.

   PE -   Provider Edge router

   POP -   Point Of Presence

   L3VPN -   Layer 3 Virtual Private Networks RFC4364

   6PE -   IPv6 Provider Edge Router

   IGP -   Interior Gateway Protocol

   The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT",
   "SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and "OPTIONAL" in this
   document are to be interpreted as described in [RFC2119]

2.  Introduction

   There are three types of BGP deployments within Autonomous Systems
   today: full mesh, confederations and route reflection.  BGP route
   reflection [RFC4456] is the most popular way to distribute BGP routes
   between BGP speakers belonging to the same Autonomous System.  In
   some situations, this method suffers from non-optimal path selection.

2.1.  Problem Statement

   [RFC4456] asserts that, because the Interior Gateway Protocol (IGP)
   cost to a given point in the network will vary across routers, "the
   route reflection approach may not yield the same route selection
   result as that of the full IBGP mesh approach."  One practical
   implication of this assertion is that the deployment of route
   reflection may thwart the ability to achieve hot potato routing.  Hot
   potato routing attempts to direct traffic to the best AS exit point
   in cases where no higher priority policy dictates otherwise.  As a
   consequence of the route reflection method, the choice of exit point
   for a route reflector and its clients will be the exit point best for
   the route reflector - not necessarily the one best for the RR
   clients.

   Section 11 of [RFC4456] describes a deployment approach and a set of
   constraints which, if satisfied, would result in the deployment of
   route reflection yielding the same results as the iBGP full mesh
   approach.  This deployment approach makes route reflection compatible
   with the application of hot potato routing policy.  In accordance
   with these design rules, route reflectors have traditionally often
   been deployed in the forwarding path and carefully placed on the POP
   to core boundaries.




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   The evolving model of intra-domain network design has enabled
   deployments of route reflectors outside of the forwarding path.
   Initially this model was only employed for new address families, e.g.
   L3VPNs and L2VPNs.  This model has been gradually extended to other
   BGP address families including IPv4 and IPv6 Internet using either
   native routing or 6PE.  In such environments, hot potato routing
   policy remains desirable.

   Route reflectors outside of the forwarding path can be placed on the
   POP to core boundaries, but they are often placed in arbitrary
   locations in the core of large networks.

   Such deployments suffer from a critical drawback in the context of
   best path selection: A route reflector with knowledge of multiple
   paths for a given prefix will typically pick its best path and only
   advertise that best path to its clients.  If the best path for a
   prefix is selected on the basis of an IGP tie break, the path
   advertised will be the exit point closest to the route reflector.
   But the clients will be in a different place in the network topology
   than the route reflector.  In networks where the route reflectors are
   not in the forwarding path, this difference will be even more acute.
   Beside this, there are also deployment scenarios where service
   providers want to have more control of choosing the exit points for
   clients based on other factors like traffic type, traffic load, etc.
   This further complicated the issue and makes it less likely for the
   route reflector to select the best path from the client's
   perspective.  It follows that the best path chosen by the route
   reflector is not necessarily the same as the path which would have
   been chosen by the client if the client had considered the same set
   of candidate paths as the route reflector.

2.2.  Existing/Alternative Solutions

   One possible valid solution or workaround to the best path selection
   problem requires sending all domain external paths from the RR to all
   its clients.  This approach suffers the significant drawback of
   pushing a large amount of BGP state to all edge routers.  Many
   networks receive full Internet routing information in a large number
   of locations.  This could easily result in tens of paths for each
   prefix that would need to be distributed to clients.

   Notwithstanding this drawback, there are a number of reasons for
   sending more than just the single best path to the clients.  Improved
   path diversity at the edge is a requirement for fast connectivity
   restoration, and a requirement for effective BGP level load
   balancing.





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   In practical terms, add/diverse path deployments are expected to
   result in the distribution of 2, 3 or n (where n is a small number)
   good paths rather than all domain external paths.  While the route
   reflector chooses one set of n paths and distributes those same n
   paths to all its route reflector clients, those n paths may not be
   the right n paths for all clients.  In the context of the problem
   described above, those n paths will not necessarily include the best
   exit point out of the network for each route reflector client.  The
   mechanisms proposed in this document are likely to be complementary
   to mechanisms aimed at improving path diversity.

   Another possibility to optimize exit points would be installing
   physical hardware at various IGP locations or what is quite unlikely
   to attach Route Reflectors over manually created tunnels.

   The paradigm of control plane is shifting from traditional routers to
   x86 virtual space or even cloud.  As result without this proposal
   operators have choice of their route reflectors distributing
   suboptimal paths or distributing all paths and in turn allowing
   clients to make independent best path selection.

   Now while the latter could be even an option in router's world more
   and more BGP is being observed on the compute servers where sending
   there all present in an AS BGP paths would be for one undesired as
   well would require to run also IGP there.  Let's also note that
   number of paths per BGP prefix varies a lot.  Depending on the
   network it can be anywhere from few to few hundreds.

3.  Proposed Solutions

   The goal of this document is to allow a route reflector to choose the
   best path the client would have chosen had the client considered the
   same set of candidate paths the reflector has available.  For
   purposes of route selection, the perspective of a client can differ
   from that of a route reflector or another client in two distinct
   ways: it can, and usually will, have a different position in the IGP
   topology, and it can have a different routing policy.  These
   correspond to the issues described earlier.  Accordingly, we propose
   two distinct modifications to the best path algorithm, to address
   these two distinct factors.  A route reflector can implement either
   or both of the modifications, as needed in order to allow it to
   choose the best path the client would have chosen had the client
   considered the same set of candidate paths.

   Both modifications rely upon all route reflectors learning all paths
   which are eligible for consideration.  In order to satisfy this
   requirement, path diversity enhancing mechanisms such as ADD-PATH/
   diverse paths may need to be deployed between route reflectors.



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   A significant advantage of these approaches is that the RR clients do
   not need to run new software or hardware.

3.1.  Client's Perspective IGP Based Best Path Selection

   The core of this solution is the ability for an operator to specify
   on a per route reflector basis or per peer/update group basis or per
   peer basis the virtual IGP location placement of the route reflector.
   This enables having a given group of clients receive routes with
   optimal distance to the next hops from the position of the configured
   virtual IGP location.  This also provides for freedom of route
   reflector location and allows transient or permanent migration of
   such network control plane function to optimal location.

   The choice of specific granularity is left to the implementation
   decision.  An implementation is considered compliant with the
   document if it supports at least one listed grouping of virtual IGP
   placement.

   In this document we refer to optimal as the decision made during best
   path selection at the IGP metric to BGP next hop comparison step.
   This approach does not apply to path selection preference based other
   policy steps and provisions.

   The computation of the virtual IGP location with any of the above
   described granularity is outside of the scope of this document.  The
   operator may configure it manually, implementation may automate it
   based on specified heuristic or it can be computed centrally and
   configured by an external system.

   The solution does not require any BGP or IGP protocol changes as
   required changes are contained within the RR implementation.

   The solution applies to NLRIs of all address families which can be
   route reflected.

3.2.  Client's Perspective Policy Based Best Path Selection

   Optimal route reflection based on virtual IGP location could reflect
   the best path to the client from IGP cost perspective.  However,
   there are also cases where the client might want best path from
   perspectives beyond IGP cost.  Examples include, but not limited to:

   o  Select the best path for the clients from a traffic engineering
      perspective.

   o  Dedicate certain exit points for certain ingress points.




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   The solution proposed here is to allow the user to apply a general
   policy to select a subset of exit points as the candidate exit points
   for its clients.  For a given client, the policy should also allow
   service providers to select different candidate exit points for
   different address families.  Regular path selection, including
   client's perspective IGP based best path selection stated above, will
   be applied to the candidate paths to select the final paths to
   advertise to the clients.

   The policy is applied on the route reflector on behalf of its
   clients.  This way, the route reflector will be able to reflect only
   the optimal paths to the clients.  An additional advantage of this
   approach is that configuration need only be done on a small number of
   route reflectors rather than a significantly larger number of
   clients.

3.3.  Solution Interactions

   Depending on the actual deployment scenarios, service providers may
   configure IGP based optimal route reflection or policy based optimal
   route reflection.  It's also possible to configure both approaches
   together.  In that case, policy based optimal route reflection will
   be applied first to select the candidate paths.  Subsequently, IGP
   based optimal route reflection will be applied on top of the
   candidate paths to select the final path to advertise to the client.

   The expected use case for optimal route reflection is to avoid
   reflecting all paths to the client because the client either does not
   support add-paths or does not have the capacity to process all of the
   paths.  Typically the route reflector would just reflect a single
   optimal route to the client.  However, the solutions MUST NOT prevent
   reflecting more than one optimal path to the client; the client may
   want path diversity for load balancing or fast restoration.  In case
   add-path and optimal route reflection are configured together, the
   route reflector MUST reflect n optimal paths to a client, where n is
   the add-path count.

   The most complicated scenario is where add-path is configured
   together with both IGP based and policy based optimal route
   reflection.  In this scenario, the policy based optimal route
   reflection will be applied first to select the candidate paths.
   Subsequently, IGP based optimal route reflection will be applied on
   top of the candidate paths to select the best n paths to advertise to
   the client.

   In IGP based optimal route reflection, even though the virtual IGP
   location could be specified on a per route reflector basis or per
   peer group basis or per peer basis, in reality, it's most likely to



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   be specified per peer group basis.  All clients with the same or
   similar IGP location can be grouped into the same peer group.  A
   virtual IGP location is then specified for the peer group.  The
   virtual location is usually specified as the location of one of the
   clients from the peer group or an ABR to the area where clients are
   located.  Also, one or more backup virtual location SHOULD be allowed
   to be specified for redundancy.  Implementations may wish to take
   advantage of peer group mechanisms in order to provide for better
   scalability of optimal route reflector client groups with similar
   properties.

4.  CPU and Memory Scalability

   For IGP based optimal route reflection, determining the shortest path
   and associated cost between any two arbitrary points in a network
   based on the IGP topology learned by a router is expected to add some
   extra cost in terms of CPU resources.  However SPF tree generation
   code is now implemented efficiently in a number of implementations,
   and therefore this is not expected to be a major drawback.  The
   number of SPTs computed is expected to be of the order of the number
   of clients of an RR whenever a topology change is detected.  Advanced
   optimizations like partial and incremental SPF may also be exploited.
   The number of SPTs computed is expected to be higher but comparable
   to some existing deployed features such as (Remote) Loop Free
   Alternate which computes a (r)SPT per IGP neighbor.

   For policy based optimal route reflection, there will be some
   overhead to apply the policy to select the candidate paths.  This
   overhead is comparable to existing BGP export policies therefore
   should be manageable.

   By the nature of route reflection, the number of clients can be split
   arbitrarily by the deployment of more route reflectors for a given
   number of clients.  While this is not expected to be necessary in
   existing networks with best in class route reflectors available
   today, this avenue to scaling up the route reflection infrastructure
   would be available.

   If we consider the overall network wide cost/benefit factor, the only
   alternative to achieve the same level of optimality would require
   significantly increasing state on the edges of the network.  This
   will consume CPU and memory resources on all BGP speakers in the
   network.  Building this client perspective into the route reflectors
   seems appropriate.







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5.  Advantages and Deployment Considerations

   The solutions described provide a model for integrating the client
   perspective into the best path computation for RRs.  More
   specifically, the choice of BGP path factors in either the IGP cost
   between the client and the nexthop (rather than the distance from the
   RR to the nexthop) or user configured policies.

   Implementation to be declared as complaint with this memo should
   allow to configure per instance or per group of peers logical
   location from which either for the entire instance or for set of
   peers best path will be computed.

   These solutions can be deployed in traditional hop-by-hop forwarding
   networks as well as in end-to-end tunneled environments.  In the
   networks where there are multiple route reflectors and hop-by-hop
   forwarding without encapsulation, such optimizations should be
   enabled in a consistent way on all route reflectors.  Otherwise
   clients may receive an inconsistent view of the network and in turn
   lead to intra-domain forwarding loops.

   With this approach, an ISP can effect a hot potato routing policy
   even if route reflection has been moved from the forwarding plane and
   hop-by-hop switching has been replaced by end-to-end MPLS or IP
   encapsulation.

   As per above, these approaches reduce the amount of state which needs
   to be pushed to the edge of the network in order to perform hot
   potato routing.  The memory and CPU resource required at the edge of
   the network to provide hot potato routing using these approaches is
   lower than what would be required in order to achieve the same level
   of optimality by pushing and retaining all available paths
   (potentially 10s) per each prefix at the edge.

   The proposals allow for a fast and safe transition to a BGP control
   plane with centralized route reflection without compromising an
   operator's closest exit operational principle.  This enables edge-to-
   edge LSP/IP encapsulation for traffic to IPv4 and IPv6 prefixes.

   Regarding the client's IGP best-path selection, it should be self
   evident that this solution does not interfere with policies enforced
   above IGP tie breaking in the BGP best path algorithm.

6.  Security Considerations

   No new security issues are introduced to the BGP protocol by this
   specification.




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7.  IANA Considerations

   This document does not request any IANA allocations.

8.  Acknowledgments

   Authors would like to thank Keyur Patel, Eric Rosen, Clarence
   Filsfils, Uli Bornhauser, Russ White, Jakob Heitz, Mike Shand, Jon
   Mitchell, John Scudder, Jeff Haas, Martin Djernaes and Daniele
   Ceccarelli for their valuable input.

9.  References

9.1.  Normative References

   [RFC2119]  Bradner, S., "Key words for use in RFCs to Indicate
              Requirement Levels", BCP 14, RFC 2119,
              DOI 10.17487/RFC2119, March 1997,
              <http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc2119>.

   [RFC4271]  Rekhter, Y., Ed., Li, T., Ed., and S. Hares, Ed., "A
              Border Gateway Protocol 4 (BGP-4)", RFC 4271,
              DOI 10.17487/RFC4271, January 2006,
              <http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc4271>.

   [RFC4360]  Sangli, S., Tappan, D., and Y. Rekhter, "BGP Extended
              Communities Attribute", RFC 4360, DOI 10.17487/RFC4360,
              February 2006, <http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc4360>.

   [RFC5492]  Scudder, J. and R. Chandra, "Capabilities Advertisement
              with BGP-4", RFC 5492, DOI 10.17487/RFC5492, February
              2009, <http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc5492>.

9.2.  Informative References

   [I-D.ietf-idr-add-paths]
              Walton, D., Retana, A., Chen, E., and J. Scudder,
              "Advertisement of Multiple Paths in BGP", draft-ietf-idr-
              add-paths-15 (work in progress), May 2016.

   [RFC1997]  Chandra, R., Traina, P., and T. Li, "BGP Communities
              Attribute", RFC 1997, DOI 10.17487/RFC1997, August 1996,
              <http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc1997>.

   [RFC1998]  Chen, E. and T. Bates, "An Application of the BGP
              Community Attribute in Multi-home Routing", RFC 1998,
              DOI 10.17487/RFC1998, August 1996,
              <http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc1998>.



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   [RFC4384]  Meyer, D., "BGP Communities for Data Collection", BCP 114,
              RFC 4384, DOI 10.17487/RFC4384, February 2006,
              <http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc4384>.

   [RFC4456]  Bates, T., Chen, E., and R. Chandra, "BGP Route
              Reflection: An Alternative to Full Mesh Internal BGP
              (IBGP)", RFC 4456, DOI 10.17487/RFC4456, April 2006,
              <http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc4456>.

   [RFC4893]  Vohra, Q. and E. Chen, "BGP Support for Four-octet AS
              Number Space", RFC 4893, DOI 10.17487/RFC4893, May 2007,
              <http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc4893>.

   [RFC5283]  Decraene, B., Le Roux, JL., and I. Minei, "LDP Extension
              for Inter-Area Label Switched Paths (LSPs)", RFC 5283,
              DOI 10.17487/RFC5283, July 2008,
              <http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc5283>.

   [RFC5668]  Rekhter, Y., Sangli, S., and D. Tappan, "4-Octet AS
              Specific BGP Extended Community", RFC 5668,
              DOI 10.17487/RFC5668, October 2009,
              <http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc5668>.

   [RFC5714]  Shand, M. and S. Bryant, "IP Fast Reroute Framework",
              RFC 5714, DOI 10.17487/RFC5714, January 2010,
              <http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc5714>.

   [RFC6774]  Raszuk, R., Ed., Fernando, R., Patel, K., McPherson, D.,
              and K. Kumaki, "Distribution of Diverse BGP Paths",
              RFC 6774, DOI 10.17487/RFC6774, November 2012,
              <http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc6774>.

Authors' Addresses

   Robert Raszuk (editor)
   Bloomberg LP
   731 Lexington Ave
   New York City, NY  10022
   USA

   Email: robert@raszuk.net










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   Christian Cassar
   Cisco Systems
   10 New Square Park
   Bedfont Lakes, FELTHAM  TW14 8HA
   UK

   Email: ccassar@cisco.com


   Erik Aman
   TeliaSonera
   Marbackagatan 11
   Farsta  SE-123 86
   Sweden

   Email: erik.aman@teliasonera.com


   Bruno Decraene
   Orange
   38-40 rue du General Leclerc
   Issy les Moulineaux cedex 9  92794
   France

   Email: bruno.decraene@orange.com


   Stephane Litkowski
   Orange
   9 rue du chene germain
   Cesson Sevigne  35512
   France

   Email: stephane.litkowski@orange.com


   Kevin Wang
   Juniper Networks
   10 Technology Park Drive
   Westford, MA  01886
   USA

   Email: kfwang@juniper.net








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