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

[Owen DeLong]

On Dec 17, 2009, at 6:00 PM, Leo Bicknell wrote:

> 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.
>
The fundamental issue of overloading end system identifiers with
topological locator semantics is not from BGP and is a major
source of scaling problems.

Scalable routing depends on not impairing the topological locators
with end system identifier semantics and vice versa.  People are
progressively less willing to tolerate the dictates of aggregation, and,
this means that scaleable routing requires that we develop a routing
system based on a more aggregable construct related to actual
topology rather than end-system identifier semantics.

Owen