Network Working Group A. Atlas, Ed.
Internet-Draft T. Nadeau
Intended status: Informational Juniper Networks
Expires: January 31, 2013 D. Ward
Cisco Systems
July 30, 2012
Interface to the Routing System Framework
draft-ward-irs-framework-00
Abstract
This document describes a framework for a standard, programmatic
interface for full-duplex, streaming state transfer in and out of the
Internet's routing system. It lists the information that might be
exchanged over the interface, and describes the uses of an interface
to the Internet routing system.
Status of this Memo
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Table of Contents
1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
1.1. Functional Overview . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
1.2. Example Use-Cases . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
2. Programmatic Interfaces . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
3. Common Interface Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
3.1. Capabilities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
3.2. Identity, Authorization, Authentication, and Security . . 8
3.3. Speed and Frequency of State Installation . . . . . . . . 8
3.4. Lifetime of IRS-Installed Routing System State . . . . . . 9
3.5. Start-Time of IRS-Installed Routing System State . . . . . 10
4. Bidirectional Interfaces to the Routing System . . . . . . . . 10
4.1. Static Routing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
4.1.1. Routing Information Base Interface . . . . . . . . . . 11
4.1.2. Label Forwarding Information Base Interface . . . . . 12
4.1.3. Multicast Routing Information Base Interface . . . . . 13
4.2. Beyond Destination-based Routing . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
4.2.1. Policy-Based Routing Interface . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
4.2.2. QoS State . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
4.3. Protocol Interactions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
4.3.1. IGP Interfaces . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
4.3.2. BGP Interface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
4.3.3. PIM and mLDP Interfaces . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
4.4. Triggered Sessions and Signaling . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
4.4.1. OAM-related Sessions Interface . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
4.4.2. Dynamic Session Creation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
4.4.3. Triggered Signaling . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
5. Interfaces for Learned Information from the Routing System . . 16
5.1. Efforts to Obtain Topological Data . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
5.2. Measurements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18
5.3. Events . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18
6. Manageability Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
7. IANA Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
8. Security Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
9. Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20
10. Informative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20
Authors' Addresses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
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1. Introduction
Routers that form the Internet's routing infrastructure maintain
state at various layers of detail and function. For example, each
router has a Routing Information Base (RIB), and the routing
protocols (OSPF, ISIS, BGP, etc.) each maintain protocol state and
information about the state of the network.
A router also has information that may be required for applications
to understand the network, verify that programmed state is installed
in the forwarding plane, measure the behavior of various flows, and
understand the existing configuration and state of the router.
Furthermore, routers are configured or implemented with procedural or
policy-based instructions for how to convert all of this information
into the forwarding operations that are installed in the forwarding
plane, and this is also state information that describes the
behaviour of the router.
This document sets out a framework for a common, standard interface
to allow access to all of this information. This Interface to the
Routing System (IRS) would facilitate control and diagnosis of the
routing infrastructure, as well as enabling sophisticated
applications to be built on top of today's routed networks. The IRS
is a programmatic, streaming interface for transferring state into
and out of the Internet's routing system, and recognizes that the
routing system and a router's OS provide useful mechanisms that
applications could harness to accomplish application-level goals.
Fundamental to the IRS is a clear data model that defines the
semantics of the information that can be written and read. The IRS
provides a framework for registering for and requesting the
appropriate information for each particular application. The IRS
provides a way for applications to customize network behaviour while
leveraging the existing routing system.
The IRS, and therefore this document, is specifically focused on an
interface for routing and forwarding data.
1.1. Functional Overview
There are three key aspects to the IRS. First, the interface is a
programmatic streaming interface meaning that it is asynchronous and
offers fast, interactive access.Second, the IRS gives access to
information and state that is not usually configurable or modeled in
existing implementations or configuration protocols. Third, the IRS
gives applications the ability to learn additional, structured,
filterable information and events from the router.
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IRS is described as a streaming programmatic interface; the key
properties that are intended are:
Multiple Simultaneous Asynchronous Operations: A single application
should be able to send multiple operations to IRS without needing
to wait for each to complete before sending the next.
Configuration Not Re-Processed: When an IRS operation is processed,
it does not require that any of the configuration be processed.
I.e. the desired behavior with regard to static configuration is
the same as learning a new BGP route - completely orthogonal.
Duplex: Communications can be established by either the router or
the application. Similarly, events, acknowledgements, failures,
operations, etc. can be sent at any time by both the router and
the application. This is not a pure pull-model where only the
application queries to pull responses.
High-Throughput: At a minimum, the IRS should be able to handle
hundreds of operations per second.
Responsive: It should be possible to complete simple operations
within a sub-second time-scale.
Multi-Channel: It should be possible for information to be
communicated via the interface from different components in the
router without requiring going through a single channel. For
example, for scaling, some exported data or events may be better
sent directly from the forwarding plane, while other interactions
may come from the control-plane. Thus a single TCP session per
application would not be a good match.
Such an interface facilitates the specification of non-permanent
state into the routing system as well as the extraction of that
information and additional dynamic information from the routing
system. A non-routing protocol or application could inject state
into a networking node's OS via the state-insertion aspects of the
interface, that could then be distributed in a routing or signaling
protocol.
Where existing mechanisms can provide part of the desired
functionality, the coverage and gaps are briefly discussed in this
document.
The existing mechanisms, such as SNMP and NetConf, that allow state
to be written and read do not meet all of the above key properties
needed for IRS. The overhead of infrastructure is also quite high
and many MIBs do not, in definition or practice, allow writing of
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state. There is also very limited capability to add new application-
specific state to be distributed via the routing system. Conversely,
NetConf is challenging for reading state from a router.
ForCES is another method for writing state into a router, but its
focus is on the forwarding plane. By focusing on the forwarding
plane, it requires that the forwarding plane be modeled and
programmable and ignores the existence and intelligence of the router
OS and routing system. ForCES provides a lower-level interface than
IRS is intended to address.
1.2. Example Use-Cases
A few brief examples of ways an application could use the IRS are
presented here. These are intended to give a sense of what could be
done rather than to be primary and detailed motivational use-cases.
Route Control via Indirection: By enabling an application to
install routes in the RIB, it is possible that when, for example,
BGP resolves its IGP next-hop via the RIB, that could be to an
application-installed route. In general, when a route is
redistributed from one protocol to another, this is done via the
RIB and such a route could have been installed via the IRS
interface.
Policy-Based Routing of Unknown Traffic: A static route, installed
into the RIB, could direct otherwise unrecognized traffic towards
an application, through whatever appropriate tunnel was required,
for further handling. Such a static route could be programmed
with indirection, so that its outgoing path is whatever is used by
another particular route (e.g. to a particular server).
Services with Fixed Hours: If an application were to provide
services only during fixed time-periods, the application could
install both a specific route on the local router in the RIB and
advertise the associated prefix as being attached to the local
router via the IGP. If the application knew the fixed hours, the
state so installed could be time-based and automatically removed
at approximately the correct time.
Traffic Mirroring: The interface to the multicast RIB could be used
to mirror a particular traffic flow to both its original
destination and a data collector.
Static Multicast Trees: An application could set up static (or
partially static) multicast flows via entries in the multicast RIB
without requiring an associated multicast protocol. This could be
useful in networks with a fixed topology and well-planned
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distribution tree that provides redundancy.
2. Programmatic Interfaces
A number of management interfaces exist today that allow for the
indirect programming of the routing system. These include
proprietary CLI, Netconf, and SNMP. However, none of these
mechanisms allows for the direct programming of the routing system.
Such streaming interfaces are needed to support dynamic time-based
applications.
These interfaces should cater to how applications typically interact
with other applications and network services rather than forcing them
to use older mechanisms that are more complex to understand and
implement, as well as operate.
The most critical component of the IRS is developing standard data
models with their associated semantics. While many routing protocols
are standardized, associated data models for IRS are not yet
available. Instead, each router uses different information,
mechanisms, and CLI which makes a standard interface for use by
applications extremely cumbersome to develop and maintain. Well-
known data modeling languages, such as YANG [RFC6020], exist and
might be used for defining the necessary data models; more
investigation into alternatives is required. It is understood that
some portion (hopefully a small subset) will remain as proprietary
extensions; the data models must support future extensions and
proprietary extensions.
Since the IRS will need to support remote access between applications
running on a host or server and routers in the network, at least one
standard mechanism must be identified and defined to provide the
transfer syntax, as defined by a protocol, used to communicate
between the application and the routing system. Common functionality
that IRS needs to support includes acknowledgements, dependencies,
request-reserve-commit.
Appropriate candidate protocols must be identified that reduce the
effort required by applications and, preferably, are familiar to
application developers. Ideally, this should not require that
applications understand and implement existing routing protocols to
interact with IRS. These interfaces should instead be based on
light-weight, rapidly deployable approaches; technology approaches
must be evaluated but examples could include ReSTful web services,
JSON, XMPP, and XML. These interfaces should possess self-describing
attributes (e.g. a web services interface) so that applications can
quickly query and learn about the active capabilities of a device.
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It may be desirable to also define the local syntax (e.g. programming
language APIs) that applications running local to a router can use.
Since evolution is anticipated in IRS over time, it is important that
versioning and backwards compatibility are basic supported
functionality. Similarly, common consistent error-handling and
acknowledgement mechanisms are required that do not severely limit
the scalability and responsiveness of these interfaces.
3. Common Interface Considerations
3.1. Capabilities
Capability negotiation is a critical requirement because different
implementations and software versions will have different abilities.
Similarly, applications may have different capabilities for receiving
exported information.
The IRS will have multiple interfaces, each with their own set of
capabilities. Such capabilities may include the particular data
model and what operations can be performed at what scale.
The capabilities negotiated may be filtered based upon different
information, such as the application's authorization, application's
capabilities, and the desired granularity for abstraction which the
application understands. Different types of authorization may
require the router to advertise different capabilities and
restrictions.
The capability negotiation may take place at different levels of
detail based upon the application and the specific functions in the
IRS that the application is negotiating. The router and application
must use the IRS to agree upon the proper level of abstraction for
the interaction. For example, when an application describes a route
between two topological items, these items may vary in detail from a
network domain's name at a high level, or down to the port forwarding
specifics of a particular device.
The data-model and capabilities available for an element may depend
upon whether the element is physical or virtual; the virtual/physical
distinction does not matter to IRS. Similarly, the location of the
element may influence how an application converses with the
associated router.
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3.2. Identity, Authorization, Authentication, and Security
Applications that wish to manipulate or interrogate the state of the
routing system must be appropriately authorized. This means that at
least one means of determining the unique identity of an application
and its associated access privileges must be available; this implies
that the identity and associated access privileges must be verifiable
from the router being programmed.
Furthermore, being able to associate a state and the modifications to
a state with a specific application would aid in troubleshooting and
auditing of the routing system. By associating identity and
authorization with installed state, other applications with
appropriate authority can clean up state abandoned by failed
applications, if necessary.
Security of communication between the application and the router is
also critical and must be considered in the design of the mechanisms
to support these programmatic interfaces.
3.3. Speed and Frequency of State Installation
A programmatic interface does not by itself imply the frequency of
state updates nor the speed at which the state installation is
required. These are critical aspects of an interface and govern what
an application can use the interface for. The difference between
sub-second responsiveness to millions of updates and a day delay per
update is, obviously, drastic. The key attributes of the
programmatic interface are described in Section 1 and include that
the interface must be asynchronous.
For each interface in IRS, it will be necessary to specify expected
scaling, responsiveness, and performance so that applications can
understand the uses to which the IRS can be used.
IRS must support asynchronous streaming real-time interactions
between the applications and router. IRS must assume that there are
many unrelated applications that may be simultaneously using IRS.
This implies that applications must be able to subscribe to change
events that notify them about changes done to state by other
applications or configuration.
Furthermore, IRS should construct interfaces that cater to different
scaling and frequency of update parameters. For example, slow, but
detailed queries of the system, or fast yet higher level (less
detailed) queries or modifications.
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3.4. Lifetime of IRS-Installed Routing System State
In routers today, the lifetime of different routing state depends
upon how that state was learned and committed. If the state is
configuration state, then it is ephemeral when just in the running
configuration or persistent when written to the startup
configuration. If the state is learned via a routing protocol or
SNMP, it is ephemeral, lasting only until the router reboots or the
state is withdrawn.
Unlike previous injection mechanisms that implied the state lifetime,
IRS requires that multiple models be supported for the lifetime of
state it installs. This is because the lifetime or persistence of
state of the routing system can vary based on the application that
programmed it, policies or security authorization of the application.
There are four basic models to be supported.
Ephemeral: State installed by the application remains on the router
in its active memory until such time as it is either removed by a
routing or signaling protocol, removed by a configuration
initiated by an application, or the router reboots. In the case
of the latter, past state is forgotten when the router reboots.
Persistent: State installed by the application remains on the
router across reboots or restarts of the system. It can be
dynamically removed or manipulated by an application, by
configuration, or by the routing system itself. This state does
not appear in the router's configuration; it is processed after
all the configuration upon a reboot.
Time-Based: When state is installed by the application, it has an
expiration time specified. When that time has passed, the state
is removed from the router. It can also be dynamically removed or
manipulated by an application, by configuration or the routing
system itself. State that hasn't expired will remain on a router
through reboots.
Time-Based Ephemeral: When state is installed by the application,
it has an expiration time specified. When that time has passed,
the state is removed from the router. It can also be dynamically
removed or manipulated by an application, by configuration, by the
routing system itself, or by the router rebooting. Past state is
forgotten after the router reboots.
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3.5. Start-Time of IRS-Installed Routing System State
To provide flexibility, pre-programming, and handle dependencies, it
is necessary to have multiple models of when a operation is to be
handled. There are the following basic models to be supported.
Immediate: When the operation is received, it should be acted upon
as quickly as reasonable (e.g. queued with other outstanding
requests if necessary).
Time-Based: An application may provide an operation that is to be
initiated at a particular time. When the specified time is
reached, the operation should be acted upon as quickly as
reasonable. Implementations may, of course, strive to improve the
time-accuracy at which the operation is initiated.
Triggered: The operation should be initiated when the specified
triggering event has happened. A triggering event could be the
successful or failed completion of another operation. A
triggering event could be a system event, such as an interface up
or down, or another event such as a particular route changing its
next-hops.
Because it is possible to request operations in models other than
"Immediate" and some of the start-times will be at an unknown future
point (e.g. "Triggered"), it is not feasible to guarantee that the
resources required by an operation will always be available without
reserving them from the time the operation is received. While that
type of resource reservation should be possible, applications must
also be able to handle an operation failing or being preempted due to
resources or due to a higher priority or better authorized
application taking ownership of the associated state or resource.
4. Bidirectional Interfaces to the Routing System
IRS is a bidirectional programmatic interface that allows both
routing and non-routing applications to install, remove, read, and
otherwise manipulate the state of the routing system.
Just as the Internet routing system is not a single protocol or
implementation layer, neither does it make sense for the IRS to be at
a single layer or reside within a single protocol. For each protocol
or layer, there are different data models, abstractions and interface
syntaxes and semantics required. Howeve,r with this in mind, it is
ideal that a minimal set of mechanism(s) to define, transfer and
manipulate this state will be specified with as few optional
characteristics as possible. This will foster better
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interoperability between different vendor implementations.
Since IRS is focused on the routing system, the layers of interest
start with the RIB and continue up through the IGPs, BGP, RSVP-TE,
LDP, etc. The intent is neither to provide interfaces to the
forwarding plane nor to provide interfaces to application layers.
It is critical that these interfaces provide the ability to learn
state, filtered by request, as well as install state. IRS assumes
that there will be multiple applications using IRS and therefore the
ability to read state is necessary to fully know the router's state.
In general, if an interface allows the setting of state, the ability
to read and modify that state is also necessary.
4.1. Static Routing
The ability to specify static routes exists via CLI and MIBs but
these mechanisms do not provide a streaming programmatic interface.
IRS solves this problem by proposing interfaces to the RIB, LFIB, and
Multicast RIBs.
By installing static routes into the RIB layer, IRS is able to
utilize the existing router OS and its mechanisms for distributing
the selected routes into the FIB and LIB. This avoids the need to
model or standardize the forwarding plane.
4.1.1. Routing Information Base Interface
The RIB is populated with routes and next-hops as supplied by
configuration, management, or routing protocols. A route has a
preference based upon the specific source from which the route was
derived. Static routes, specified via CLI, can be installed with an
appropriate preference. The FIB is populated by selecting from the
RIB based on policy and tie-breaking criteria.
The IRS interface should allow dynamic reading and writing of routes
into the RIB. There are several important attributes associated with
doing so, as follows:
Preference Value: This allows decisions between conflicting routes,
whether IRS-installed or otherwise. IRS-installed routes can each
be installed with a different preference value.
Route Table Context: There can be different route table contexts in
the RIB. Examples include multiple protocols (e.g. IPv4, IPv6),
multiple topologies, different uses, and multiple networks (e.g.
VRF tables for VPNs). Appropriate application-level abstractions
are required to describe the desired route table context.
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Route or Traffic Identification The specific IP prefix or even
interface must be specified.
Outgoing Path and Encapsulation: It is necessary to specify the
outgoing path and associated encapsulation. This may be done
directly or indirectly. This is one of the more complex aspects
with the following considerations.
Primary Next-Hops: To support multi-path forwarding, multiple
primary next-hops can be specified and the traffic flows split
among them.
Indirection: Instead of specifying particular primary next-hops,
it is critical to be able to provide the ability for
indirection, such as is used between BGP routes and IGP routes.
Thus, the outgoing path might be specified via indirection to
be the same as another route's.
Encapsulation: Associated with each primary next-hop can be
details on the type of encapsulation for the packet. Such
encapsulation could be MPLS, GRE, etc. as supported by the
router.
Protection: For fast-reroute protection, each primary next-hop
may have one or more alternate next-hops specified. Those are
to be used when the primary next-hop fails.
DSCP: For QoS, the desired DSCP to be used for the outgoing
traffic can be specified.
It is useful for an application to be able to read out the RIB state
associated with particular traffic and be able to learn both the
preferred route and its source as well as other candidates with lower
preference.
Although there is no standardized model or specification of a RIB, it
may be possible to build an interoperable bi-directional interface
without one.
4.1.2. Label Forwarding Information Base Interface
The LFIB has a similar role to the RIB for MPLS labeled packets.
Each entry has slightly different information to accommodate MPLS
forwarding and semantics. Although static MPLS can be used to
configure specific state into the LFIB, there is no bidirectional
programmatic interface to program, modify, or read the associated
state.
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Each entry in the LFIB requires a MPLS label context (e.g. platform,
per-interface, or other context), incoming label, label operation,
and next-hops with associated encapsulation, label operation, and so
on. Via the IRS LFIB interface, an application could supply the
information for an entry using either a pre-allocated MPLS label or a
newly allocated MPLS label that is returned to the application.
4.1.3. Multicast Routing Information Base Interface
There is no bidirectional programmatic interface to add, modify,
remove or read state from the multicast RIB. This IRS interface
would add those capabilities.
Multicast forwarding state can be set up by a variety of protocols.
As with the unicast RIB, an application may wish to install a new
route for multicast. The state to add might be the full multicast
route information - including the incoming interface, the particular
multicast traffic (e.g. (source, group) or MPLS label), and the
outgoing interfaces and associated encapsulations to replicate the
traffic too.
The multicast state added need not match to well-known protocol
installed state. For instance, traffic received on an specified set,
or all, interfaces that is destined to a particular prefix from all
sources or a particular prefix could be subject to the specified
replication.
4.2. Beyond Destination-based Routing
Routing decisions and traffic treatment is not merely expressable via
destination-based routing or even (S, G) routing, such as in
multicast. Capturing these aspects into appropriate interfaces for
the IRS provides the ability for applications to control them as
well.
4.2.1. Policy-Based Routing Interface
A common feature of routers is the ability to specify policy-based
routing (PBR) rules for accepting, dropping, or differently
forwarding particular traffic. This is a very useful functionality
for an application to be able to rapidly add and remove state into.
Such state would indicate the particular traffic to be affected and
its subsequent behavior (e.g. drop, accept, forward on specified
outgoing path and encapsulation, QoS, DSCP marking, policing, etc.).
Such state is made more complex by the potential importance of
ordering among the PBR rules.
While PBR rules can be specified via CLI, this mechanism is not a
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streaming programmatic interface nor is there generally the ability
to specify particular time-based lifetimes for each rule.
4.2.2. QoS State
While per-hop behaviors are defined as well as standard DSCP
meanings, the details of QoS configuration are not standardized and
can be highly variable depending upon platform. It is NOT a goal of
this work to standardize QoS configurations. Instead, a data object
model can define push/pull configurations. More investigation is
needed to better describe the details.
4.3. Protocol Interactions
Providing IRS interfaces to the various routing protocols allows
applications to specify policy, local topology changes, and
availability to influence the routing protocols in a way that the
detailed addition or modification of routes in the RIB does not.
The decision to distribute the routing state via a routing or
signaling protocol depends upon the protocol-layer at which this
state is injected into the routing system. It may also depend upon
which routing domain or domains this information is injected as well.
In addition it is necessary to have the ability to pull state
regarding various protocols from the router, a mechanism to register
for asynchronous events, and the means to obtain those asynchronous
events. An example of such state might be peer up/down.
4.3.1. IGP Interfaces
The lack of a streaming programmatic interface to the IGPs limits the
ability of applications to influence and modify the desired behavior
of the IGP.
An application may need to indicate that a router is overloaded (via
ISIS or the method described in [RFC3137]) because that router does
not yet have sufficient state synchronized or installed into it.
When critical state is provided not merely by routers but also from
applications via the IRS, a synchronization mechanism can be needed.
The ability for an application to modify the local topology can be
part of this interface. One possibility is to allow modification of
local interface metrics to generally influence selected routes. A
more extensive interface might include the ability to create a OSPF
or ISIS adjacency across a specified interface (virtual or real) with
the appropriate associated encapsulation.
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The ability to attach a prefix to the local router would provide a
straightforward method for an application to program a single router
and have the proper routes computed and installed by all other
routers in the relevant domains. Additional aspects to the prefix
attachment, such as the metric with which to attach the prefix and
fast-reroute characteristics, would be part of the interface.
Beyond such pure routing information, the need for an application to
be able to install state to be flooded via an IGP has already been
recognized. [I-D.ietf-isis-genapp] specifies a mechanism for
flooding generalized application information via ISIS, but does not
describe how an application can generate or consume this information.
Similarly, [RFC5250] specifies Opaque LSAs for OSPF to provide for
application-specific information to be flooded. An IRS interface and
associated data object model would provide such a mechanism.
Additional investigation will identify other state that applications
may wish to install.
From the IGP, applications via IRS can extract significant
topological information about the routers, links, and associated
attributes.
4.3.2. BGP Interface
BGP carries significant policy and per-application specific
information as well as internet routes. A significant interface into
BGP is expected, with different data object models for different
applications. For example, the IRS interface to BGP could provide
the ability to specify the policy on which paths BGP chooses to
advertise. Additionally, the ability to specify information with an
application-specified AFI/SAFI could provide substantial flexibility
and control.
An existing example of application information carried in BGP is BGP
Flowspec [RFC5575] which can be used to provide traffic filtering and
aid in handling denial-of-service attacks.
The ability to extract information from BGP is also quite critical.
A useful example of this is the information available from BGP via
[I-D.gredler-idr-ls-distribution], which allows link-state topology
information to be carried in BGP.
4.3.3. PIM and mLDP Interfaces
For PIM and mLDP, there are at least two types of state that an
application might wish to install. First, an application might add
an interface to join a particular multicast group. Second, an
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application might provide an upstream route for traffic to be
received from - rather than having PIM or mLDP need to consult the
unicast RIB.
Additional investigation will identify other state that applications
may wish to install.
4.4. Triggered Sessions and Signaling
4.4.1. OAM-related Sessions Interface
An application may need to trigger new OAM sessions (e.g. BFD, VCCP,
etc.) using an appropriate template. For example, there may be
applications that need to create a new tunnel, verify its
functionality via new triggered OAM sessions, and then bring it into
service if that OAM indicates successful functionality. More
investigation is needed to better describe the details.
4.4.2. Dynamic Session Creation
An application may wish to trigger a peering relationship for a
protocol. For instance, a targeted LDP session may be required to
exchange state installed locally with a remote router. More
investigation is needed to better describe the different cases and
details.
4.4.3. Triggered Signaling
To easily create dynamic state throughout the network, an application
may need to trigger signaling via protocols such as RSVP-TE. An
example of such an application can be a Stateful Path Computation
Element (PCE)[I-D.ietf-pce-stateful-pce], which has control of
various LSPs that need to be signaled.
More investigation is needed to better describe the different cases
and details.
5. Interfaces for Learned Information from the Routing System
Just as applications need to inject state into the routing system to
meet various application-specific and policy-based requirements, it
is critical that applications be able to also extract necessary state
from the routing system.
A part of each of these interfaces is the ability to specify the
generation of the desired information (e.g., collecting specific per-
flow measurements) and the ability to specify appropriate filters to
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indicate the specifics and abstraction level of the information to be
provided
The types of information to extract can be generally grouped into the
following different categories.
Topological: The need to understand the network topology, at a
suitable abstraction layer, is critical to applications.
Connectivity is not sufficient - the associated costs, bandwidths,
latencies, etc. are all important aspects of the network topology
that strongly influence the decision-making and behavior of
applications.
Measurements: Applications require measurements of traffic and
network behavior in order to have a more meaningful feedback
control loop. Such information may be per-interface, per-flow,
per-firewall rule, per-queue, etc.
Events: There are a variety of asynchronous events that an
application may require or use as triggering conditions for
starting other operations. An obvious example is interface state
events.
Configuration: For some aspects, it may be necessary for
applications to be able to learn about the routing configuration
on a box. This is partially available via various MIBs and
NetConf. What additional information needs to be exported and the
appropriate mechanisms needs further examination.
The need to extract information from the network is not new; there is
on-going work in the IETF in this area. This framework describes
those efforts in the context of the above categories and starts the
discussion of the aspects still required.
5.1. Efforts to Obtain Topological Data
Topological data can be defined and presented at different layers
(e.g. Layer-2, Layer-3) and with different characteristics exposed
or hidden (e.g. physical or virtual, SRLGs, bandwidth, latency,
etc.). It can also have different states, such as configured but
unavailable, configurable, active, broken, administratively disabled,
etc.
To solve the problem of only being able to obtain topological data
via listening to the IGP in each area, BGP-LS
[I-D.gredler-idr-ls-distribution] defines extensions to BGP so that
link-state topology information can be carried in BGP and a single
BGP listener in the AS can therefore learn and distribute the entire
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AS's current link-state topology. BGP-LS solves the problem of
distributing topological information throughout the network. While
IRS may expand the information to be distributed, IRS addresses the
API aspect of BGP-LS and not the network-wide distribution.
At another level, ALTO [RFC5693] provides topological information at
a higher abstraction layer, which can be based upon network policy,
and with application-relevant services located in it. The mechanism
for ALTO obtaining the topology can vary and policy can apply to what
is provided or abstracted.
Neither of these fully meet the need to obtain detailed, layered
topological state that provides more information than the current
functional status. While there are currently no sufficiently
complete standards, the need for such functionality can be deduced by
the number of proprietary systems that have been developed to obtain
and manage topology; even Element Management Systems start with the
need for learning and manipulating the topology. Similarly,
orchestration layers for applications start with the need to manage
topology and the associated database.
Detailed topology includes aspects such as physical nodes, physical
links, virtual links, port to interface mapping, etc. The details
should include the operational and administrative state as well as
relevant parameters ranging from link bandwidth to SRLG membership.
Layering is critical to provide the topology at the level of
abstraction where it can be easily used by the application.
A key aspect of this interface is the ability to easily rate-limit,
filter and specify the desired information to be extracted. This
will help in allowing the interface to scale when queries are done.
5.2. Measurements
IPFIX [RFC5470] provides a way to measure and export per-traffic flow
statistics. Applications that need to collect information about
particular flows thus have a clear need to be able to install state
to configure IPFIX to measure and export the relevant flows to the
appropriate collectors.
5.3. Events
A programmatic interface for application to subscribe to asynchronous
events is necessary. In addition to the interface state events
already mentioned, an application may wish to subscribe to certain
OAM-triggered events that aren't otherwise exported.
A RIB-based event could be reporting when the next-hops associated
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with a route have changed. Other events could be used to verify that
forwarding state has been programmed. For example, an application
could request an event whenever a particular route in the RIB has its
forwarding plane installation completed.
When an application registers for events, the application may request
to get only the first such event, all such events, or all events
until a certain time.
The full set of such events, that are not specifically related to
other interfaces, needs to be investigated and defined.
6. Manageability Considerations
Manageability plays a key aspect in IRS. Some initial examples
include:
Data Authorization Levels: The data-models used for IRS need the
ability to indicate the required authorization level for
installing or reading a particular subset of data. This allows
control of what interactions each application can have.
Identity Authorization Levels: Associated with an application's
identity should be an identity authorization level that is in a
heirarchy so that higher authorized applications can manage and
remove the state and resources used by other applications. The
top of such a heirarchy would be the router configuration itself.
Resource Limitations: Using IRS, applications can consume
resources, whether those be operations in a time-frame, entries in
the RIB, stored operations to be triggered, etc. The ability to
set resource limits based upon authorization is critical.
Configuration Interactions: The interaction of state installed via
the IRS and via a router's configuration needs to be clearly
defined.
7. IANA Considerations
This document includes no request to IANA.
8. Security Considerations
This framework describes interfaces that clearly require serious
consideration of security. The ability to identify, authenticate and
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authorize applications that wish to install state is necessary and
briefly described in Section 3.2. Security of communications from
the applications is also required.
More specifics on the security requirements requires further
investigation.
9. Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank Ken Gray, Adrian Farrel, Bruno
Rijsman, Rex Fernando, Jan Medved, John Scudder, and Hannes Gredler
for their suggestions and review.
10. Informative References
[I-D.gredler-idr-ls-distribution]
Gredler, H., Medved, J., Previdi, S., and A. Farrel,
"North-Bound Distribution of Link-State and TE Information
using BGP", draft-gredler-idr-ls-distribution-02 (work in
progress), July 2012.
[I-D.ietf-isis-genapp]
Ginsberg, L., Previdi, S., and M. Shand, "Advertising
Generic Information in IS-IS", draft-ietf-isis-genapp-04
(work in progress), November 2010.
[I-D.ietf-pce-stateful-pce]
Crabbe, E., Medved, J., Varga, R., and I. Minei, "PCEP
Extensions for Stateful PCE",
draft-ietf-pce-stateful-pce-01 (work in progress),
July 2012.
[RFC3137] Retana, A., Nguyen, L., White, R., Zinin, A., and D.
McPherson, "OSPF Stub Router Advertisement", RFC 3137,
June 2001.
[RFC5250] Berger, L., Bryskin, I., Zinin, A., and R. Coltun, "The
OSPF Opaque LSA Option", RFC 5250, July 2008.
[RFC5470] Sadasivan, G., Brownlee, N., Claise, B., and J. Quittek,
"Architecture for IP Flow Information Export", RFC 5470,
March 2009.
[RFC5575] Marques, P., Sheth, N., Raszuk, R., Greene, B., Mauch, J.,
and D. McPherson, "Dissemination of Flow Specification
Rules", RFC 5575, August 2009.
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[RFC5693] Seedorf, J. and E. Burger, "Application-Layer Traffic
Optimization (ALTO) Problem Statement", RFC 5693,
October 2009.
[RFC6020] Bjorklund, M., "YANG - A Data Modeling Language for the
Network Configuration Protocol (NETCONF)", RFC 6020,
October 2010.
Authors' Addresses
Alia Atlas (editor)
Juniper Networks
10 Technology Park Drive
Westford, MA 01886
USA
Email: akatlas@juniper.net
Thomas Nadeau
Juniper Networks
1194 N. Mathilda Ave.
Sunnyvale, CA 94089
USA
Email: tnadeau@juniper.net
Dave Ward
Cisco Systems
Tasman Drive
San Jose, CA 95134
USA
Email: wardd@cisco.com
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