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Link State Vector Routing (lsvr)

WG Name Link State Vector Routing
Acronym lsvr
Area Routing Area (rtg)
State Active
Charter charter-ietf-lsvr-01 Approved
Status update Show Changed 2019-03-19
Document dependencies
Additional resources Issue tracker, Wiki, Zulip Stream
Personnel Chairs Jie Dong, Ketan Talaulikar
Area Director Jim Guichard
Mailing list Address lsvr@ietf.org
To subscribe https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/lsvr
Archive https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/browse/lsvr/
Chat Room address https://zulip.ietf.org/#narrow/stream/lsvr

Charter for Working Group

Data Centers have been steadily growing to commonly host tens of thousands of end points, or more, in a single network. Because of their topologies (traditional and emerging), traffic patterns, need for fast restoration, and for low human intervention, data center networks have a unique set of requirements that is resulting in the design of routing solutions specific to them.

The Link-State Vector Routing (LSVR) Working Group is chartered to develop and document a hybrid routing protocol utilizing a combination of link-state and path-vector routing mechanisms. The LSVR WG will utilize existing IPv4/IPv6 transport, packet formats and error handling of BGP-4 consistent with BGP-LS NLRI encoding mechanisms (RFC7752) to facilitate Link-State Vector (LSV) routing information distribution. An LSV is intended to be specified as a data structure comprised of link attributes, neighbor information, and other and other potential attributes that can be utilized to make routing decisions.

The LSVR specification is initially focused on operation within a single datacenter (DC) as a single distribution domain, which is defined as a set of participating nodes in a single administrative domain. Routing protocol functionality defined by LSVR would be typically routing within a datacenter’s underlay routing plane. The work will include coexistence considerations with BGP IPv4/IPv6 unicast address families installing and advertising routes into the same RIB.

The WG will consider the effects (if any) of deploying the LSVR protocol while concurrently using the same transport session as other existing BGP address families. These considerations will be documented as part of the main protocol specification. A mechanism to be able to independently deploy LSVR from other address families may be defined (as needed).

The LSVR protocol is intended as a self-standing routing protocol even if using existing BGP transport mechanisms and encodings, or if sharing the same transport session with other existing BGP address families. Similar as existing routing protocols, the LSVR protocol will not internally combine the route selection mechanisms or share routing information, except through common external interaction methods in the RIB.

In order to achieve the noted objective, the working group will focus on standardization of protocol functionality, defining Link-State Vectors (LSVs) and defining standard path-vector route selection utilizing the Dijkstra SPF based algorithm, BGP-4 protocol mechanics and BGP-LS NRLI encoding.

The working group will provide specifications to manage routing information from other unicast routing protocols or BGP address families to common prefixes.

The LSVR WG is chartered to deliver the following documents:

  • Specification document describing LSV with standard Dijkstra SPF route/path selection (calculation) utilizing existing BGP protocol baseline functionality and BGP-LS packet encoding formats

  • Specification documenting protocol extensions required to efficiently reuse BGP to distribute LSVs within an IPv4/IPv6 DC with scope to include privacy and security considerations

    • The impact of these extensions to the security properties of BGP will be studied and documented
    • New attack vectors will be explored and documented
    • Mitigations to any new attack vectors identified will be discussed and documented
  • Applicability Statement for the use of LSVR in the Datacenter

  • YANG model specification for LSVR management

The WG will closely collaborate with the idr WG. Any modifications or extension to BGP that will not be specifically constrained to be used by LSVR must be carried out in the idr WG, but may be done in this WG after agreement with all the relevant chairs and the responsible Area Directors.

Milestones

Date Milestone Associated documents
Mar 2025 YANG specification for LSVR draft-ietf-lsvr-bgp-ls-yang
Oct 2024 Applicability statement for LSVR in DCs draft-ietf-lsvr-applicability
Sep 2024 LSV distribution using BGP transport draft-ietf-lsvr-bgp-spf
Sep 2024 LSVR with standard Dijkstra path selection draft-ietf-lsvr-bgp-spf