[arin-ppml] Routing Research Group is about to decide its scalable routing recommendation

[Leo Bicknell]

In a message written on Fri, Dec 18, 2009 at 12:02:24PM +1100, Robin Whittle wrote:
> the IRTF RRG is about to decide on its recommendation to the
> IETF about scalable routing.

I'm hoping you can fill in a gap for me, as I don't follow this
work very closely.

In looking at the problems with the current Internet it appears
most of the blame is laid at the feet of BGP4.  BGP has a number
of properties that lead to scaling issues, some well documented,
some not so well documented.

All the solutions I see proposed though are fundamental changes to
how we do addressing.  Locator-Identifier separation ideas, alternate
lookup databases (e.g. DNS), translation solutions, including simple
NAT and address embedding.

What I haven't seen is anything that makes the leap from "BGP is
broken" to "the whole architecture must be changed".  More specifically,
I haven't seen anyone look at BGPv5, or a brand new replacement
routing protocol.  It seems that improving the system and fixing
some of the known issues may be useful if nothing else as a stopgap,
and yet no one seems to be working seriously on the issue.

I also haven't seen any analysis on how much of the issues with BGP
scaling come from things that have been lumped on to BGP, like MPLS
VPN's.  That is, if we hadn't added these things to BGP would we
have no scaling problems at the current time?

-- 
       Leo Bicknell - bicknell at ufp.org - CCIE 3440
        PGP keys at http://www.ufp.org/~bicknell/
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