Internet Research Task Force (IRTF) E. Davies
Request for Comments: 5773 Folly Consulting
Category: Historic A. Doria
ISSN: 2070-1721 LTU
February 2010
Analysis of Inter-Domain Routing Requirements and History
Abstract
This document analyzes the state of the Internet domain-based routing
system, concentrating on Inter-Domain Routing (IDR) and also
considering the relationship between inter-domain and intra-domain
routing. The analysis is carried out with respect to RFC 1126 and
other IDR requirements and design efforts looking at the routing
system as it appeared to be in 2001 with editorial additions
reflecting developments up to 2006. It is the companion document to
"A Set of Possible Requirements for a Future Routing Architecture"
(RFC 5772), which is a discussion of requirements for the future
routing architecture, addressing systems developments and future
routing protocols. This document summarizes discussions held several
years ago by members of the IRTF Routing Research Group (IRTF RRG)
and other interested parties. The document is published with the
support of the IRTF RRG as a record of the work completed at that
time, but with the understanding that it does not necessarily
represent either the latest technical understanding or the technical
consensus of the research group at the date of publication.
Status of This Memo
This document is not an Internet Standards Track specification; it is
published for the historical record.
This document defines a Historic Document for the Internet community.
This document is a product of the Internet Research Task Force
(IRTF). The IRTF publishes the results of Internet-related research
and development activities. These results might not be suitable for
deployment. This RFC represents the individual opinion(s) of one or
more members of the Routing Research Group of the Internet Research
Task Force (IRTF). Documents approved for publication by the IRSG
are not a candidate for any level of Internet Standard; see Section 2
of RFC 5741.
Information about the current status of this document, any errata,
and how to provide feedback on it may be obtained at
http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc5773.
Davies & Doria Historic [Page 1]RFC 5773 IDR History February 2010
Copyright Notice
Copyright (c) 2010 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.
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RFC 5773 IDR History February 2010
Table of Contents
1. Provenance of This Document .....................................4
2. Introduction ....................................................5
2.1. Background .................................................7
3. Historical Perspective ..........................................7
3.1. The Legacy of RFC 1126 .....................................7
3.1.1. General Requirements ................................8
3.1.2. "Functional Requirements" ..........................13
3.1.3. "Non-Goals" ........................................21
3.2. ISO OSI IDRP, BGP, and the Development of Policy Routing ..25
3.3. Nimrod Requirements .......................................30
3.4. PNNI ......................................................32
4. Recent Research Work ...........................................33
4.1. Developments in Internet Connectivity .....................33
4.2. DARPA NewArch Project .....................................34
4.2.1. Defending the End-to-End Principle .................35
5. Existing Problems of BGP and the Current Inter-/Intra-Domain
Architecture ...................................................35
5.1. BGP and Auto-Aggregation ..................................36
5.2. Convergence and Recovery Issues ...........................36
5.3. Non-Locality of Effects of Instability and
Misconfiguration ..........................................37
5.4. Multi-Homing Issues .......................................37
5.5. AS Number Exhaustion ......................................38
5.6. Partitioned ASs ...........................................39
5.7. Load Sharing ..............................................40
5.8. Hold-Down Issues ..........................................40
5.9. Interaction between Inter-Domain Routing and
Intra-Domain Routing ......................................40
5.10. Policy Issues ............................................42
5.11. Security Issues ..........................................42
5.12. Support of MPLS and VPNS .................................43
5.13. IPv4/IPv6 Ships in the Night .............................43
5.14. Existing Tools to Support Effective Deployment of
Inter-Domain Routing .....................................44
5.14.1. Routing Policy Specification Language RPSL
(RFC 2622 and RFC 2650) and RIPE NCC Database
(RIPE 157) ........................................44
6. Security Considerations ........................................45
7. Acknowledgments ................................................45
8. Informative References .........................................46
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1. Provenance of This Document
In 2001, the IRTF Routing Research Group (IRTF RRG) chairs, Abha
Ahuja and Sean Doran, decided to establish a sub-group to look at
requirements for inter-domain routing (IDR). A group of well-known
routing experts was assembled to develop requirements for a new
routing architecture. Their mandate was to approach the problem
starting from a blank slate. This group was free to take any
approach, including a revolutionary approach, in developing
requirements for solving the problems they saw in inter-domain
routing. Their eventual approach documented requirements for a
complete future routing and addressing architecture rather than just
the requirements for IDR.
Simultaneously, an independent effort was started in Sweden with a
similar goal. A team, calling itself Babylon, with participation
from vendors, service providers, and academia, assembled to
understand the history of inter-domain routing, to research the
problems seen by the service providers, and to develop a proposal of
requirements for a follow-on to the current routing architecture.
This group's approach required an evolutionary approach starting from
current routing architecture and practice. In other words, the group
limited itself to developing an evolutionary strategy and
consequently assumed that the architecture would probably remain
domain-based. The Babylon group was later folded into the IRTF RRG
as Sub-Group B to distinguish it from the original RRG Sub-Group A.
This document, which was a part of Sub-Group B's output, provides a
snapshot of the state of Inter-Domain Routing (IDR) at the time of
original writing (2001) with some minor updates to take into account
developments since that date, bringing it up to date in 2006. The
development of the new requirements set was then motivated by an
analysis of the problems that IDR has been encountering in the recent
past. This document is intended as a counterpart to the Routing
Requirements document ("A Set of Possible Requirements for a Future
Routing Architecture"), which documents the requirements for future
routing systems as captured separately by the IRTF RRG Sub-Groups A
and B [RFC5772].
The IRTF RRG supported publication of this document as a historical
record of the work completed on the understanding that it does not
necessarily represent either the latest technical understanding or
the technical consensus of the research group at the time of
publication. The document has had substantial review by members of
the Babylon team, members of the IRTF RRG, and others over the years.
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2. Introduction
For the greater part of its existence, the Internet has used a
domain-oriented routing system whereby the routers and other nodes
making up the infrastructure are partitioned into a set of
administrative domains, primarily along ownership lines. Individual
routing domains (also known as Autonomous Systems (ASs)), which maybe
a subset of an administrative domain, are made up of a finite,
connected set of nodes (at least in normal operation). Each routing
domain is subject to a coherent set of routing and other policies
managed by a single administrative authority. The domains are
interlinked to form the greater Internet, producing a very large
network: in practice, we have to treat this network as if it were
infinite in extent as there is no central knowledge about the whole
network of domains. An early presentation of the concept of routing
domains can be found in Paul Francis' OSI routing architecture paper
from 1987 [Tsuchiya87] (Paul Francis was formerly known as Paul
Tsuchiya).
The domain concept and domain-oriented routing has become so
fundamental to Internet-routing thinking that it is generally taken
as an axiom these days and not even defined again (cf., [NewArch03]).
The issues discussed in the present document notwithstanding, it has
proved to be a robust and successful architectural concept that
brings with it the possibility of using different routing mechanisms
and protocols within the domains (intra-domain) and between the
domains (inter-domain). This is an attractive division, because
intra-domain protocols can exploit the well-known finite scope of the
domain and the mutual trust engendered by shared ownership to give a
high degree of control to the domain administrators, whereas inter-
domain routing lives in an essentially infinite region featuring a
climate of distrust built on a multitude of competitive commercial
agreements and driven by less-than-fully-public policies from each
component domain. Of course, like any other assumption that has been
around for a very long time, the domain concept should be reevaluated
to make sure that it is still helping!
It is generally accepted that there are major shortcomings in the
inter-domain routing of the Internet today and that these may result
in severe routing problems within an unspecified period of time.
Remedying these shortcomings will require extensive research to tie
down the exact failure modes that lead to these shortcomings and
identify the best techniques to remedy the situation. Comparatively,
intra-domain routing works satisfactorily, and issues with intra-
domain routing are mainly associated with the interface between
intra- and inter-domain routing.
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Reviewer's Note: Even in 2001, there was a wide difference of
opinion across the community regarding the shortcomings of inter-
domain routing. In the years between writing and publication,
further analysis, changes in operational practice, alterations to
the demands made on inter-domain routing, modifications made to
BGP and a recognition of the difficulty of finding a replacement
may have altered the views of some members of the community.
Changes in the nature and quality of the services that users want
from the Internet are difficult to provide within the current
framework, as they impose requirements never foreseen by the original
architects of the Internet routing system.
The kind of radical changes that have to be accommodated are
epitomized by the advent of IPv6 and the application of IP mechanisms
to private commercial networks that offer specific service guarantees
beyond the best-effort services of the public Internet. Major
changes to the inter-domain routing system are inevitable to provide
an efficient underpinning for the radically changed and increasingly
commercially-based networks that rely on the IP protocol suite.
Current practice stresses the need to separate the concerns of the
control plane and the forwarding plane in a router: this document
will follow this practice, but we still use the term "routing" as a
global portmanteau to cover all aspects of the system.
This document provides a historical perspective on the current state
of inter-domain routing and its relationship to intra-domain routing
in Section 3 by revisiting the previous IETF requirements document
intended to steer the development of a future routing system. These
requirements, which informed the design of the Border Gateway
Protocol (BGP) in 1989, are contained in RFC 1126 -- "Goals and
Functional Requirements for Inter-Autonomous System Routing"
[RFC1126].
Section 3 also looks at some other work on requirements for domain-
based routing that was carried out before and after RFC 1126 was
published. This work fleshes out the historical perspective and
provides some additional insights into alternative approaches that
may be instructive when building a new set of requirements.
The motivation for change and the inspiration for some of the
requirements for new routing architectures derive from the problems
attributable to the current domain-based routing system that are
being experienced in the Internet today. These will be discussed in
Section 5.
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2.1. Background
Today's Internet uses an addressing and routing structure that has
developed in an ad hoc, more or less upwards-compatible fashion. The
structure has progressed from supporting a non-commercial Internet
with a single administrative domain to a solution that is able to
control today's multi-domain, federated Internet, carrying traffic
between the networks of commercial, governmental, and not-for-profit
participants. This is not achieved without a great deal of 24/7
vigilance and operational activity by network operators: Internet
routing often appears to be running close to the limits of stability.
As well as directing traffic to its intended endpoint, inter-domain
routing mechanisms are expected to implement a host of domain-
specific routing policies for competing, communicating domains. The
result is not ideal, particularly as regards inter-domain routing
mechanisms, but it does a pretty fair job at its primary goal of
providing any-to-any connectivity to many millions of computers.
Based on a large body of anecdotal evidence, but also on a growing
body of experimental evidence [Labovitz02] and analytic work on the
stability of BGP under certain policy specifications [Griffin99], the
main Internet inter-domain routing protocol, BGP version 4 (BGP-4),
appears to have a number of problems. These problems are discussed
in more detail in Section 5. Additionally, the hierarchical nature
of the inter-domain routing problem appears to be changing as the
connectivity between domains becomes increasingly meshed [RFC3221],
which alters some of the scaling and structuring assumptions on which
BGP-4 is built. Patches and fix-ups may relieve some of these
problems, but others may require a new architecture and new
protocols.
3. Historical Perspective
3.1. The Legacy of RFC 1126
RFC 1126 [RFC1126] outlined a set of requirements that were intended
to guide the development of BGP.
Editors' Note: When this document was reviewed by Yakov Rekhter,
one of the designers of BGP, his view was that "While some people
expected a set of requirements outlined in RFC 1126 to guide the
development of BGP, in reality the development of BGP happened
completely independently of RFC 1126. In other words, from the
point of view of the development of BGP, RFC 1126 turned out to be
totally irrelevant". On the other hand, it appears that BGP, as
currently implemented, has met a large proportion of these
requirements, especially for unicast traffic.
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While the network is demonstrably different from what it was in 1989,
having:
o moved from single to multiple administrative control,
o increased in size by several orders of magnitude, and
o migrated from a fairly tree-like connectivity graph to a meshier
style
many of the same requirements remain. As a first step in setting
requirements for the future, we need to understand the requirements
that were originally set for the current protocols. In charting a
future architecture, we must first be sure to do no harm. This means
a future domain-based routing system has to support, as its base
requirement, the level of function that is available today.
The following sections each relate to a requirement, or non-
requirement listed in RFC 1126. In fact, the section names are
direct quotes from the document. The discussion of these
requirements covers the following areas:
Explanation: Optional interpretation for today's audience of
the original intent of the requirement.
Relevance: Is the requirement of RFC 1126 still relevant, and
to what degree? Should it be understood
differently in today's environment?
Current practice: How well is the requirement met by current
protocols and practice?
3.1.1. General Requirements
3.1.1.1. "Route to Destination"
Timely routing to all reachable destinations, including multi-homing
and multicast.
Relevance: Valid, but requirements for multi-homing need
further discussion and elucidation. The
requirement should include multiple-source
multicast routing.
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Current practice: Multi-homing is not efficient, and the proposed
inter-domain multicast protocol Border Gateway
Multicast Protocol (BGMP) [RFC3913] is an add-on
to BGP following many of the same strategies but
not integrated into the BGP framework.
Editors' Note: Multicast routing has moved on
again since this was originally written. By
2006, BGMP had been effectively superseded.
Multicast routing now uses Multi-protocol BGP
[RFC4760], the Multicast Source Discovery
Protocol (MSDP) [RFC3618], and Protocol
Independent Multicast - Sparse Mode (PIM-SM)
[RFC2362], [RFC4601], especially the Source
Specific Multicast (SSM) subset.
3.1.1.2. "Routing is Assured"
This requires that a user be notified within a reasonable time period
after persistent attempts, about inability to provide a service.
Relevance: Valid.
Current practice: There are ICMP messages for this; but, in many
cases, they are not used, either because of fears
about creating message storms or uncertainty about
whether the end system can do anything useful with
the resulting information. IPv6 implementations
may be able to make better use of the information
as they may have alternative addresses that could
be used to exploit an alternative routing.
3.1.1.3. "Large System"
The architecture was designed to accommodate the growth of the
Internet.
Relevance: Valid. Properties of Internet topology might be
an issue for future scalability (topology varies
from very sparse to quite dense at present).
Instead of setting out to accommodate growth in a
specific time period, indefinite growth should be
accommodated. On the other hand, such growth has
to be accommodated without making the protocols
too expensive -- trade-offs may be necessary.
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Current practice: Scalability of the current protocols will not be
sufficient under the current rate of growth.
There are problems with BGP convergence for large
dense topologies, problems with the slow speed of
routing information propagation between routers in
transit domains through the intra-domain protocol,
for example, when a failure requires traffic to be
redirected to an alternative exit point from the
domain (see Section 5.9), limited support for
hierarchy, etc.
3.1.1.4. "Autonomous Operation"
This requirement encapsulates the need for administrative domains
("Autonomous Systems" - AS) to be able to operate autonomously as
regards setting routing policy:
Relevance: Valid. There may need to be additional
requirements for adjusting policy decisions to the
global functionality and for avoiding
contradictory policies. This would decrease the
possibility of unstable routing behavior.
There is a need for handling various degrees of
trust in autonomous operations, ranging from no
trust (e.g., between separate ISPs) to very high
trust where the domains have a common goal of
optimizing their mutual policies.
Policies for intra-domain operations should, in
some cases, be revealed, using suitable
abstractions.
Current practice: Policy management is in the control of network
managers, as required, but there is little support
for handling policies at an abstract level for a
domain.
Cooperating administrative entities decide about
the extent of cooperation independently. This can
lead to inconsistent, and potentially incompatible
routing policies being applied in notionally
cooperating domains. As discussed in Sections
5.2, 5.3, and 5.10, lack of coordination combined
with global range of effects of BGP policies
results in occasional disruption of Internet
routing over an area far wider than the domains
that are not cooperating effectively.
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3.1.1.5. "Distributed System"
The routing environment is a distributed system. The distributed
routing environment supports redundancy and diversity of nodes and
links. Both the controlling rule sets, which implement the routing
policies, and the places where operational control is applied,
through decisions on path selection, are distributed (primarily in
the routers).
Relevance: Valid. RFC 1126 is very clear that we should not
be using centralized solutions, but maybe we need
a discussion on trade-offs between common
knowledge and distribution (i.e., to allow for
uniform policy routing, e.g., Global System for
Mobile Communications (GSM) systems are in a sense
centralized, but with hierarchies).
Current practice: Routing is very distributed, but lacking the
ability to consider optimization over several hops
or domains.
Editors' Note: Also, coordinating the
implementation of a set of routing policies
across a large domain with many routers running
BGP is difficult. The policies have to be
turned into BGP rules and applied individually
to each router, giving opportunities for
mismatch and error.
3.1.1.6. "Provide A Credible Environment"
The routing environment and services should be based upon mechanisms
and information that exhibit both integrity and security. That is,
the routers should always be working with credible data derived
through the reliable operation of protocols. Security from unwanted
modification and influence is required.
Relevance: Valid.
Current practice: BGP provides a limited mechanism for
authentication and security of peering sessions,
but this does not guarantee the authenticity or
validity of the routing information that is
exchanged.
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There are certainly security problems with the
current practice. The Routing Protocol Security
Requirements (rpsec) working group has been
struggling to agree on a set of requirements for
BGP security since early 2002.
Editors' Note: Proposals for authenticating BGP
routing information using certificates were
under development by the Secure Inter-Domain
Routing (sidr) working group from 2006 through
2008.
3.1.1.7. "Be A Managed Entity"
This requires that the routing system provides adequate information
on the state of the network to allow resource, problem, and fault
management to be carried out effectively and expeditiously. The
system must also provide controls that allow managers to use this
information to make informed decisions and use it to control the
operation of the routing system.
Relevance: The requirement is reasonable, but we might need
to be more specific on what information should be
available, e.g., to prevent routing oscillations.
Current practice: All policies are determined locally, where they
may appear reasonable but there is limited global
coordination through the routing policy databases
operated by the Internet registries (AfriNIC,
APNIC, ARIN, LACNIC, RIPE, etc.).
Operators are not required to register their
policies; even when policies are registered, it is
difficult to check that the actual policies in use
in other domains match the declared policies.
Therefore, a manager cannot guarantee to design
and implement policies that will interoperate with
those of other domains to provide stable routing.
Editors' Note: Operators report that management
of BGP-based routing remains a function that
needs highly-skilled operators and continual
attention.
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3.1.1.8. "Minimize Required Resources"
Relevance: Valid. However, the paragraph states that
assumptions on significant upgrades shouldn't be
made. Although this is reasonable, a new
architecture should perhaps be prepared to use
upgrades when they occur.
Current practice: Most bandwidth is consumed by the exchange of the
Network Layer Reachability Information (NLRI).
Usage of processing cycles ("Central Processor
Usage" - CPU) depends on the stability of the
Internet. Both phenomena have a local nature, so
there are not scaling problems with bandwidth and
CPU usage. Instability of routing increases the
consumption of resources in any case. The number
of networks in the Internet dominates memory
requirements -- this is a scaling problem.
3.1.2. "Functional Requirements"
3.1.2.1. "Route Synthesis Requirements"
3.1.2.1.1. "Route around failures dynamically"
Relevance: Valid. Should perhaps be stronger. Only
providing a best-effort attempt may not be enough
if real-time services are to be provided for.
Detection of failures may need to be faster than
100 ms to avoid being noticed by end-users.
Current practice: Latency of fail-over is too high; sometimes
minutes or longer.
3.1.2.1.2. "Provide loop free paths"
Relevance: Valid. Loops should occur only with negligible
probability and duration.
Current practice: Both link-state intra-domain routing and BGP
inter-domain routing (if correctly configured) are
forwarding-loop-free after having converged.
However, convergence time for BGP can be very
long, and poorly designed routing policies may
result in a number of BGP speakers engaging in a
cyclic pattern of advertisements and withdrawals
that never converges to a stable result [RFC3345].
Part of the reason for long convergence times is
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the non-locality of the effects of changes in BGP
advertisements (see Section 5.3). Modifying the
inter-domain routing protocol to make the effects
of changes less global, and convergence a more
local condition, might improve performance,
assuming a suitable modification could be
developed.
3.1.2.1.3. "Know when a path or destination is unavailable"
Relevance: Valid to some extent, but there is a trade-off
between aggregation and immediate knowledge of
reachability. It requires that routing tables
contain enough information to determine that the
destination is unknown or a path cannot be
constructed to reach it.
Current practice: Knowledge about lost reachability propagates
slowly through the networks due to slow
convergence for route withdrawals.
3.1.2.1.4. "Provide paths sensitive to administrative policies"
Relevance: Valid. Policy control of routing has become
increasingly important as the Internet has turned
into a business.
Current practice: Supported to some extent. Policies can only be
applied locally in an AS and not globally. Policy
information supplied has a very small probability
of affecting policies in other ASs. Furthermore,
only static policies are supported; between static
policies and policies dependent upon volatile
events of great celerity, there should exist
events of which routing should be aware. Lastly,
there is no support for policies other than route-
properties (such as AS-origin, AS-path,
destination prefix, Multi-Exit Discriminator-
values (MED-values), etc).
Editors' Note: Subsequent to the original issue
of this document, mechanisms that acknowledge
the business relationships of operators have
been developed such as the NOPEER community
attribute [RFC3765]. However, the level of
usage of this attribute is apparently not very
great.
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3.1.2.1.5. "Provide paths sensitive to user policies"
Relevance: Valid to some extent, as they may conflict with
the policies of the network administrator. It is
likely that this requirement will be met by means
of different bit-transport services offered by an
operator, but at the cost of adequate
provisioning, authentication, and policing when
utilizing the service.
Current practice: Not supported in normal routing. Can be
accomplished to some extent with loose source
routing, resulting in inefficient forwarding in
the routers. The various attempts to introduce
Quality of Service (QoS -- e.g., Integrated
Services and Differentiated Services (Diffserv))
can also be seen as means to support this
requirement, but they have met with limited
success in terms of providing alternate routes as
opposed to providing improved service on the
standard route.
Editors' Note: From the standpoint of a later
time, it would probably be more appropriate to
say "total failure" rather than "limited
success".
3.1.2.1.6. "Provide paths which characterize user quality-of-service
requirements"
Relevance: Valid to some extent, as they may conflict with
the policies of the operator. It is likely that
this requirement will be met by means of different
bit-transport services offered by an operator, but
at the cost of adequate provisioning,
authentication, and policing when utilizing the
service. It has become clear that offering to
provide a particular QoS to any arbitrary
destination from a particular source is generally
impossible: QoS, except in very "soft" forms such
as overall long-term average packet delay, is
generally associated with connection-oriented
routing.
Current practice: Creating routes with specified QoS is not
generally possible at present.
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3.1.2.1.7. "Provide autonomy between inter- and intra-autonomous system
route synthesis"
Relevance: Inter- and intra-domain routing should stay
independent, but one should notice that this, to
some extent, contradicts the previous three
requirements. There is a trade-off between
abstraction and optimality.
Current practice: Inter-domain routing is performed independently of
intra-domain routing. Intra-domain routing is
however, especially in transit domains, very
interrelated with inter-domain routing.
3.1.2.2. "Forwarding Requirements"
3.1.2.2.1. "Decouple inter- and intra-autonomous system forwarding
decisions"
Relevance: Valid.
Current practice: As explained in Section 3.1.2.1.7, intra-domain
forwarding in transit domains is dependent on
inter-domain forwarding decisions.
3.1.2.2.2. "Do not forward datagrams deemed administratively
inappropriate"
Relevance: Valid, and increasingly important in the context
of enforcing policies correctly expressed through
routing advertisements but flouted by rogue peers
that send traffic for which a route has not been
advertised. On the other hand, packets that have
been misrouted due to transient routing problems
perhaps should be forwarded to reach the
destination, although along an unexpected path.
Current practice: At stub domains (i.e., domains that do not provide
any transit service for any other domains but that
connect directly to one or more transit domains),
there is packet filtering, e.g., to catch source
address spoofing on outgoing traffic or to filter
out unwanted incoming traffic. Filtering can in
particular reject traffic (such as unauthorized
transit traffic) that has been sent to a domain
even when it has not advertised a route for such
traffic on a given interface. The growing class
of "middleboxes" (midboxes, e.g., Network Address
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Translators -- NATs) is quite likely to apply
administrative rules that will prevent the
forwarding of packets. Note that security
policies may deliberately hide administrative
denials. In the backbone, intentional packet
dropping based on policies is not common.
3.1.2.2.3. "Do not forward datagrams to failed resources"
Relevance: Unclear, although it is clearly desirable to
minimize the waste of forwarding resources by
discarding datagrams that cannot be delivered at
the earliest opportunity. There is a trade-off
between scalability and keeping track of
unreachable resources. The requirement
effectively imposes a requirement on adjacent
nodes to monitor for failures and take steps to
cause rerouting at the earliest opportunity, if a
failure is detected. However, packets that are
already in-flight or queued on a failed link
cannot generally be rescued.
Current practice: Routing protocols use both internal adjacency
management sub-protocols (e.g., "hello" protocols)
and information from equipment and lower-layer
link watchdogs to keep track of failures in
routers and connecting links. Failures will
eventually result in the routing protocol
reconfiguring the routing to avoid (if possible) a
failed resource, but this is generally very slow
(30s or more). In the meantime, datagrams may
well be forwarded to failed resources. In general
terms, end hosts and some non-router middleboxes
do not participate in these notifications, and
failures of such boxes will not affect the routing
system.
3.1.2.2.4. "Forward datagram according to its characteristics"
Relevance: Valid. This is necessary in enabling
differentiation in the network, based on QoS,
precedence, policy or security.
Current practice: Ingress and egress filtering can be done based on
policy. Some networks discriminate on the basis
of requested QoS.
Davies & Doria Historic [Page 17]RFC 5773 IDR History February 2010
3.1.2.3. "Information Requirements"
3.1.2.3.1. "Provide a distributed and descriptive information base"
Relevance: Valid. However, an alternative arrangement of
information bases, possibly with an element of
centralization for the domain (as mentioned in
Section 3.1.1.5) might offer some advantages
through the ability to optimize across the domain
and respond more quickly to changes and failures.
Current practice: The information base is distributed, but it is
unclear whether it supports all necessary routing
functionality.
3.1.2.3.2. "Determine resource availability"
Relevance: Valid. It should be possible to determine the
availability and levels of availability of any
resource (such as bandwidth) needed to carry out
routing. This prevents needing to discover
unavailability through failure. Resource location
and discovery is arguably a separate concern that
could be addressed outside the core routing
requirements.
Current practice: Resource availability is predominantly handled
outside of the routing system.
3.1.2.3.3. "Restrain transmission utilization"
Relevance: Valid. However, certain requirements in the
control plane, such as fast detection of faults
may be worth consumption of more resources.
Similarly, simplicity of implementation may make
it cheaper to "back haul" traffic to central
locations to minimize the cost of routing if
bandwidth is cheaper than processing.
Current practice: BGP messages probably do not ordinarily consume
excessive resources, but might during erroneous
conditions. In the data plane, the nearly
universal adoption of shortest-path protocols
could be considered to result in minimization of
transmission utilization.
Davies & Doria Historic [Page 18]RFC 5773 IDR History February 2010
3.1.2.3.4. "Allow limited information exchange"
Relevance: Valid. But perhaps routing could be improved if
certain information (especially policies) could be
available either globally or at least for a wider-
defined locality.
Editors' Note: Limited information exchange
would be potentially compatible with a more
local form of convergence than BGP tries to
achieve today. Limited information exchange is
potentially incompatible with global
convergence.
Current practice: Policies are used to determine which reachability
information is exported, but neighbors receiving
the information are not generally aware of the
policies that resulted in this export.
3.1.2.4. "Environmental Requirements"
3.1.2.4.1. "Support a packet-switching environment"
Relevance: Valid, but routing system should, perhaps, not be
limited to this exclusively.
Current practice: Supported.
3.1.2.4.2. "Accommodate a connection-less oriented user transport
service"
Relevance: Valid, but routing system should, perhaps, not be
limited to this exclusively.
Current practice: Accommodated.
3.1.2.4.3. "Accommodate 10K autonomous systems and 100K networks"
Relevance: No longer valid. Needs to be increased --
potentially indefinitely. It is extremely
difficult to foresee the future size expansion of
the Internet, so the Utopian solution would be to
achieve an Internet whose architecture is scale
invariant. Regrettably, this may not be
achievable without introducing undesirable
complexity and a suitable trade-off between
complexity and scalability is likely to be
necessary.
Davies & Doria Historic [Page 19]RFC 5773 IDR History February 2010
Current Practice: Supported, but perhaps reaching its limit. Since
the original version of this document was written
in 2001, the number of ASs advertised has grown
from around 8000 to 20000, and almost 35000 AS
numbers have been allocated by the regional
registries [Huston05]. If this growth continues,
the original 16-bit AS space in BGP-4 will be
exhausted in less than 5 years. Planning for an
extended AS space is now an urgent requirement.
Editors' Note: At the time of publication, 32-
bit AS numbers have been introduced and are
being deployed.
3.1.2.4.4. "Allow for arbitrary interconnection of autonomous systems"
Relevance: Valid. However, perhaps not all interconnections
should be accessible globally.
Current practice: BGP-4 allows for arbitrary interconnections.
3.1.2.5. "General Objectives"
3.1.2.5.1. "Provide routing services in a timely manner"
Relevance: Valid, as stated before. It might be acceptable
for a more complex service to take longer to
deliver, but it still has to meet the
application's requirements -- routing has to be at
the service of the end-to-end principle.
Editors' Note: Delays in setting up connections
due to network functions such as NAT boxes are
becoming increasingly problematic. The routing
system should try to keep any routing delay to
a minimum.
Current practice: More or less, with the exception of convergence
and fault robustness.
3.1.2.5.2. "Minimize constraints on systems with limited resources"
Relevance: Valid.
Current practice: Systems with limited resources are typically stub
domains that advertise very little information.
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3.1.2.5.3. "Minimize impact of dissimilarities between autonomous
systems"
Relevance: Important. This requirement is critical to a
future architecture. In a domain-based routing
environment where the internal properties of
domains may differ radically, it will be important
to be sure that these dissimilarities are
minimized at the borders.
Current: practice: For the most part, this capability is not really
required in today's networks since the intra-
domain attributes are broadly similar across
domains.
3.1.2.5.4. "Accommodate the addressing schemes and protocol mechanisms
of the autonomous systems"
Relevance: Important, probably more so than when RFC 1126 was
originally developed because of the potential
deployment of IPv6, wider usage of MPLS, and the
increasing usage of VPNs.
Current practice: Only one global addressing scheme is supported in
most autonomous systems, but the availability of
IPv6 services is steadily increasing. Some global
backbones support IPv6 routing and forwarding.
3.1.2.5.5. "Must be implementable by network vendors"
Relevance: Valid, but note that what can be implemented today
is different from what was possible when RFC 1126
was written: a future domain-based routing
architecture should not be unreasonably
constrained by past limitations.
Current practice: BGP was implemented and meets a large proportion
of the original requirements.
3.1.3. "Non-Goals"
RFC 1126 also included a section discussing non-goals. This section
discusses the extent to which these are still non-goals. It also
considers whether the fact that they were non-goals adversely affects
today's IDR system.
Davies & Doria Historic [Page 21]RFC 5773 IDR History February 2010
3.1.3.1. "Ubiquity"
The authors of RFC 1126 were explicitly saying that IP and its inter-
domain routing system need not be deployed in every AS, and a
participant should not necessarily expect to be able to reach a given
AS, possibly because of routing policies. In a sense, this "non-
goal" has effectively been achieved by the Internet and IP protocols.
This requirement reflects a different worldview where there was
serious competition for network protocols, which is really no longer
the case. Ubiquitous deployment of inter-domain routing in
particular has been achieved and must not be undone by any proposed
future domain-based routing architecture. On the other hand:
o ubiquitous connectivity cannot be reached in a policy-sensitive
environment and should not be an aim.
Editors' Note: It has been pointed out that this statement
could be interpreted as being contrary to the Internet mission
of providing universal connectivity. The fact that limits to
connectivity will be added as operational requirements in a
policy-sensitive environment should not imply that a future
domain-based routing architecture contains intrinsic limits on
connectivity.
o it must not be required that the same routing mechanisms are used
throughout, provided that they can interoperate appropriately.
o the information needed to control routing in a part of the network
should not necessarily be ubiquitously available, and it must be
possible for an operator to hide commercially sensitive
information that is not needed outside a domain.
o the introduction of IPv6 reintroduces an element of diversity into
the world of network protocols, but the similarities of IPv4 and
IPv6 as regards routing and forwarding make this event less likely
to drive an immediate diversification in routing systems. The
potential for further growth in the size of the network enabled by
IPv6 is very likely to require changes in the future: whether this
results in the replacement of one de facto ubiquitous system with
another remains to be seen but cannot be a requirement -- it will
have to interoperate with BGP during the transition.
Relevance: De facto essential for a future domain-based
routing architecture, but what is required is
ubiquity of the routing system rather than
ubiquity of connectivity and it must be capable of
a gradual takeover through interoperation with the
existing system.
Davies & Doria Historic [Page 22]RFC 5773 IDR History February 2010
Current practice: De facto ubiquity achieved.
3.1.3.2. "Congestion control"
Relevance: It is not clear if this non-goal was to be applied
to routing or forwarding. It is definitely a non-
goal to adapt the choice of route when there is
transient congestion. However, to add support for
congestion avoidance (e.g., Explicit Congestion
Notification (ECN) and ICMP messages) in the
forwarding process would be a useful addition.
There is also extensive work going on in traffic
engineering that should result in congestion
avoidance through routing as well as in
forwarding.
Current practice: Some ICMP messages (e.g., source quench) exist to
deal with congestion control, but these are not
generally used as they either make the problem
worse or there is no mechanism to reflect the
message into the application that is providing the
source.
3.1.3.3. "Load splitting"
Relevance: This should neither be a non-goal nor an explicit
goal. It might be desirable in some cases and
should be considered as an optional architectural
feature.
Current practice: Can be implemented by exporting different prefixes
on different links, but this requires manual
configuration and does not consider actual load.
Editors' Note: This configuration is carried
out extensively as of 2006 and has been a
significant factor in routing table bloat. If
this need is a real operational requirement, as
it seems to be for multi-homed or otherwise
richly connected sites, it will be necessary to
reclassify this as a real and important goal.
Davies & Doria Historic [Page 23]RFC 5773 IDR History February 2010
3.1.3.4. "Maximizing the utilization of resources"
Relevance: Valid. Cost-efficiency should be striven for; we
note that maximizing resource utilization does not
always lead to the greatest cost-efficiency.
Current practice: Not currently part of the system, though often a
"hacked in" feature done with manual
configuration.
3.1.3.5. "Schedule to deadline service"
This non-goal was put in place to ensure that the IDR did not have to
meet real-time deadline goals such as might apply to Constant Bit
Rate (CBR) real-time services in ATM.
Relevance: The hard form of deadline services is still a non-
goal for the future domain-based routing
architecture, but overall delay bounds are much
more of the essence than was the case when RFC
1126 was written.
Current practice: Service providers are now offering overall
probabilistic delay bounds on traffic contracts.
To implement these contracts, there is a
requirement for a rather looser form of delay
sensitive routing.
3.1.3.6. "Non-interference policies of resource utilization"
The requirement in RFC 1126 is somewhat opaque, but appears to imply
that what we would today call QoS routing is a non-goal and that
routing would not seek to control the elastic characteristics of
Internet traffic whereby a TCP connection can seek to utilize all the
spare bandwidth on a route, possibly to the detriment of other
connections sharing the route or crossing it.
Relevance: Open Issue. It is not clear whether dynamic QoS
routing can or should be implemented. Such a
system would seek to control the admission and
routing of traffic depending on current or recent
resource utilization. This would be particularly
problematic where traffic crosses an ownership
boundary because of the need for potentially
commercially sensitive information to be made
available outside the ownership boundary.
Davies & Doria Historic [Page 24]RFC 5773 IDR History February 2010
Current practice: Routing does not consider dynamic resource
availability. Forwarding can support service
differentiation.
3.2. ISO OSI IDRP, BGP, and the Development of Policy Routing
During the decade before the widespread success of the World Wide
Web, ISO was developing the communications architecture and protocol
suite Open Systems Interconnection (OSI). For a considerable part of
this time, OSI was seen as a possible competitor for and even a
replacement for the IP suite as this basis for the Internet. The
technical developments of the two protocols were quite heavily
interrelated with each providing ideas and even components that were
adapted into the other suite.
During the early stages of the development of OSI, the IP suite was
still mainly in use on the ARPANET and the relatively small scale
first phase NSFNET. This was effectively a single administrative
domain with a simple tree-structured network in a three-level
hierarchy connected to a single logical exchange point (the NSFNET
backbone). In the second half of the 1980s, the NSFNET was starting
on the growth and transformation that would lead to today's Internet.
It was becoming clear that the backbone routing protocol, the
Exterior Gateway Protocol (EGP) [RFC0904], was not going to cope even
with the limited expansion being planned. EGP is an "all informed"
protocol that needed to know the identities of all gateways, and this
was no longer reasonable. With the increasing complexity of the
NSFNET and the linkage of the NSFNET network to other networks, there
was a desire for policy-based routing that would allow administrators
to manage the flow of packets between networks. The first version of
the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP-1) [RFC1105] was developed as a
replacement for EGP with policy capabilities -- a stopgap EGP version
3 had been created as an interim measure while BGP was developed.
BGP was designed to work on a hierarchically structured network, such
as the original NSFNET, but could also work on networks that were at
least partially non-hierarchical where there were links between ASs
at the same level in the hierarchy (we would now call these "peering
arrangements") although the protocol made a distinction between
different kinds of links (links are classified as upwards, downwards,
or sideways). ASs themselves were a "fix" for the complexity that
developed in the three-tier structure of the NSFNET.
Meanwhile, the OSI architects, led by Lyman Chapin, were developing a
much more general architecture for large-scale networks. They had
recognized that no one node, especially an end-system (host), could
or should attempt to remember routes from "here" to "anywhere" --
this sounds obvious today, but was not so obvious 20 years ago. They
were also considering hierarchical networks with independently
Davies & Doria Historic [Page 25]RFC 5773 IDR History February 2010
administered domains -- a model already well entrenched in the
public-switched telephone network. This led to a vision of a network
with multiple independent administrative domains with an arbitrary
interconnection graph and a hierarchy of routing functionality. This
architecture was fairly well established by 1987 [Tsuchiya87]. The
architecture initially envisaged a three-level routing functionality
hierarchy in which each layer had significantly different
characteristics:
1. *End-system to intermediate system (IS) routing (host to
router)*, in which the principal functions are discovery and
redirection.
2. *Intra-domain IS-IS routing (router to router)*, in which "best"
routes between end-systems in a single administrative domain are
computed and used. A single algorithm and routing protocol would
be used throughout any one domain.
3. *Inter-domain IS-IS routing (router to router)*, in which routes
between routing domains within administrative domains are
computed (routing is considered separately between administrative
domains and routing domains).
Level 3 of this hierarchy was still somewhat fuzzy. Tsuchiya says:
The last two components, Inter-Domain and Inter-Administration
routing, are less clear-cut. It is not obvious what should be
standardized with respect to these two components of routing. For
example, for Inter-Domain routing, what can be expected from the
Domains? By asking Domains to provide some kind of external
behavior, we limit their autonomy. If we expect nothing of their
external behavior, then routing functionality will be minimal.
Across administrations, it is not known how much trust there will
be. In fact, the definition of trust itself can only be
determined by the two or more administrations involved.
Fundamentally, the problem with Inter-Domain and Inter-
Administration routing is that autonomy and mistrust are both
antithetical to routing. Accomplishing either will involve a
number of tradeoffs which will require more knowledge about the
environments within which they will operate.
Further refinement of the model occurred over the next couple of
years and a more fully formed view is given by Huitema and Dabbous in
1989 [Huitema90]. By this stage, work on the original IS-IS link-
state protocol, originated by the Digital Equipment Corporation
(DEC), was fairly advanced and was close to becoming a Draft
Davies & Doria Historic [Page 26]RFC 5773 IDR History February 2010
International Standard. IS-IS is of course a major component of
intra-domain routing today and inspired the development of the Open
Shortest Path First (OSPF) family. However, Huitema and Dabbous were
not able to give any indication of protocol work for Level 3. There
are hints of possible use of centralized route servers.
In the meantime, the NSFNET consortium and the IETF had been
struggling with the rapid growth of the NSFNET. It had been clear
since fairly early on that EGP was not suitable for handling the
expanding network and the race was on to find a replacement. There
had been some intent to include a metric in EGP to facilitate routing
decisions, but no agreement could be reached on how to define the
metric. The lack of trust was seen as one of the main reasons that
EGP could not establish a globally acceptable routing metric: again
this seems to be a clearly futile aim from this distance in time!
Consequently, EGP became effectively a rudimentary path-vector
protocol that linked gateways with Autonomous Systems. It was
totally reliant on the tree-structured network to avoid routing
loops, and the all-informed nature of EGP meant that update packets
became very large. BGP version 1 [RFC1105] was standardized in 1989,
but it had been in development for some time before this and had
already seen action in production networks prior to standardization.
BGP was the first real path-vector routing protocol and was intended
to relieve some of the scaling problems as well as providing policy-
based routing. Routes were described as paths along a "vector" of
ASs without any associated cost metric. This way of describing
routes was explicitly intended to allow detection of routing loops.
It was assumed that the intra-domain routing system was loop-free
with the implication that the total routing system would be loop-free
if there were no loops in the AS path. Note that there were no
theoretical underpinnings for this work, and it traded freedom from
routing loops for guaranteed convergence.
Also, the NSFNET was a government-funded research and education
network. Commercial companies that were partners in some of the
projects were using the NSFNET for their research activities, but it
was becoming clear that these companies also needed networks for
commercial traffic. NSFNET had put in place "acceptable use"
policies that were intended to limit the use of the network.
However, there was little or no technology to support the legal
framework.
Practical experience, IETF IAB discussion (centered in the Internet
Architecture Task Force) and the OSI theoretical work were by now
coming to the same conclusions:
o Networks were going to be composed out of multiple administrative
domains (the federated network),
Davies & Doria Historic [Page 27]RFC 5773 IDR History February 2010
o The connections between these domains would be an arbitrary graph
and certainly not a tree,
o The administrative domains would wish to establish distinctive,
independent routing policies through the graph of Autonomous
Systems, and
o Administrative domains would have a degree of distrust of each
other that would mean that policies would remain opaque.
These views were reflected by Susan Hares' (working for Merit
Networks at that time) contribution to the Internet Architecture
(INARC) workshop in 1989, summarized in the report of the workshop
[INARC89]:
The rich interconnectivity within the Internet causes routing
problems today. However, the presenter believes the problem is
not the high degree of interconnection, but the routing protocols
and models upon which these protocols are based. Rich
interconnectivity can provide redundancy which can help packets
moving even through periods of outages. Our model of interdomain
routing needs to change. The model of autonomous confederations
and autonomous systems [RFC0975] no longer fits the reality of
many regional networks. The ISO models of administrative domain
and routing domains better fit the current Internet's routing
structure.
With the first NSFNET backbone, NSF assumed that the Internet
would be used as a production network for research traffic. We
cannot stop these networks for a month and install all new routing
protocols. The Internet will need to evolve its changes to
networking protocols while still continuing to serve its users.
This reality colors how plans are made to change routing
protocols.
It is also interesting to note that the difficulties of organizing a
transition were recognized at this stage and have not been seriously
explored or resolved since.
Policies would primarily be interested in controlling which traffic
should be allowed to transit a domain (to satisfy commercial
constraints or acceptable use policies), thereby controlling which
traffic uses the resources of the domain. The solution adopted by
both the IETF and OSI was a form of distance vector hop-by-hop
routing with explicit policy terms. The reasoning for this choice
can be found in Breslau and Estrin's 1990 paper [Breslau90]
(implicitly -- because some other alternatives are given such as a
link state with policy suggestion, which, with hindsight, would have
Davies & Doria Historic [Page 28]RFC 5773 IDR History February 2010
even greater problems than BGP on a global scale network).
Traditional distance-vector protocols exchanged routing information
in the form of a destination and a metric. The new protocols
explicitly associated policy expressions with the route by including
either a list of the source ASs that are permitted to use the route
described in the routing update, and/or a list of all ASs traversed
along the advertised route.
Parallel protocol developments were already in progress by the time
this paper was published: BGP version 2 [RFC1163] in the IETF and the
Inter-Domain Routing Protocol (IDRP) [ISO10747], which would be the
Level 3 routing protocol for the OSI architecture. IDRP was
developed under the aegis of the ANSI XS3.3 working group led by
Lyman Chapin and Charles Kunzinger. The two protocols were very
similar in basic design, but IDRP has some extra features, some of
which have been incorporated into later versions of BGP; others may
yet be so, and still others may be seen to be inappropriate. Breslau
and Estrin summarize the design of IDRP as follows:
IDRP attempts to solve the looping and convergence problems
inherent in distance vector routing by including full AD
(Administrative Domain -- essentially the equivalent of what are
now called ASs) path information in routing updates. Each routing
update includes the set of ADs that must be traversed in order to
reach the specified destination. In this way, routes that contain
AD loops can be avoided.
IDRP updates also contain additional information relevant to
policy constraints. For instance, these updates can specify what
other ADs are allowed to receive the information described in the
update. In this way, IDRP is able to express source specific
policies. The IDRP protocol also provides the structure for the
addition of other types of policy related information in routing
updates. For example, User Class Identifiers (UCI) could also be
included as policy attributes in routing updates.
Using the policy route attributes IDRP provides the framework for
expressing more fine grained policy in routing decisions.
However, because it uses hop-by-hop distance vector routing, it
only allows a single route to each destination per-QOS to be
advertised. As the policy attributes associated with routes
become more fine grained, advertised routes will be applicable to
fewer sources. This implies a need for multiple routes to be
advertised for each destination in order to increase the
probability that sources have acceptable routes available to them.
This effectively replicates the routing table per forwarding
entity for each QoS, UCI, source combination that might appear in
Davies & Doria Historic [Page 29]RFC 5773 IDR History February 2010
a packet. Consequently, we claim that this approach does not
scale well as policies become more fine grained, i.e., source or
UCI specific policies.
Over the next three or four years, successive versions of BGP (BGP-2
[RFC1163], BGP-3 [RFC1267], and BGP-4 [RFC1771]) were deployed to
cope with the growing and by now commercialized Internet. From BGP-2
onwards, BGP made no assumptions about an overall structure of
interconnections allowing it to cope with today's dense web of
interconnections between ASs. BGP version 4 was developed to handle
the change from classful to classless addressing. For most of this
time, IDRP was being developed in parallel, and both protocols were
implemented in the Merit gatedaemon routing protocol suite. During
this time, there was a movement within the IETF that saw BGP as a
stopgap measure to be used until the more sophisticated IDRP could be
adapted to run over IP instead of the OSI connectionless protocol
Connectionless Network Protocol (CLNP). However, unlike its intra-
domain counterpart IS-IS, which has stood the test of time, and
indeed proved to be more flexible than OSPF, IDRP was ultimately not
adopted by the market. By the time the NSFNET backbone was
decommissioned in 1995, BGP-4 was the inter-domain routing protocol
of choice and OSI's star was already beginning to wane. IDRP is now
little remembered.
A more complete account of the capabilities of IDRP can be found in
Chapter 14 of David Piscitello and Lyman Chapin's book "Open Systems
Networking: TCP/IP and OSI", which is now readable on the Internet
[Chapin94].
IDRP also contained quite extensive means for securing routing
exchanges, much of it based on X.509 certificates for each router and
public-/private-key encryption of routing updates.
Some of the capabilities of IDRP that might yet appear in a future
version of BGP include the ability to manage routes with explicit QoS
classes and the concept of domain confederations (somewhat different
from the confederation mechanism in today's BGP) as an extra level in
the hierarchy of routing.
3.3. Nimrod Requirements
Nimrod as expressed by Noel Chiappa in his early document, "A New IP
Routing and Addressing Architecture" [Chiappa91] and later in the
NIMROD working group documents [RFC1753] and [RFC1992] established a
number of requirements that need to be considered by any new routing
architecture. The Nimrod requirements took RFC 1126 as a starting
point and went further.
Davies & Doria Historic [Page 30]RFC 5773 IDR History February 2010
The three goals of Nimrod, quoted from [RFC1992], were as follows:
1. To support a dynamic internetwork of _arbitrary size_ (our
emphasis) by providing mechanisms to control the amount of
routing information that must be known throughout an
internetwork.
2. To provide service-specific routing in the presence of multiple
constraints imposed by service providers and users.
3. To admit incremental deployment throughout an internetwork.
It is certain that these goals should be considered requirements for
any new domain-based routing architecture.
o As discussed in other sections of this document, the rate of
growth of the amount of information needed to maintain the routing
system is such that the system may not be able to scale up as the
Internet expands as foreseen. And yet, as the services and
constraints upon those services grow, there is a need for more
information to be maintained by the routing system. One of the
key terms in the first requirements is "control". While
increasing amounts of information need to be known and maintained
in the Internet, the amounts and kinds of information that are
distributed can be controlled. This goal should be reflected in
the requirements for the future domain-based architecture.
o If anything, the demand for specific services in the Internet has
grown since 1996 when the Nimrod architecture was published.
Additionally, the kinds of constraints that service providers need
to impose upon their networks and that services need to impose
upon the routing have also increased. Any changes made to the
network in the last half-decade have not significantly improved
this situation.
o The ability to incrementally deploy any new routing architecture
within the Internet is still an absolute necessity. It is
impossible to imagine that a new routing architecture could
supplant the current architecture on a flag day.
At one point in time, Nimrod, with its addressing and routing
architectures, was seen as a candidate for IPng. History shows that
it was not accepted as the IPng, having been ruled out of the
selection process by the IESG in 1994 on the grounds that it was "too
much of a research effort" [RFC1752], although input for the
requirements of IPng was explicitly solicited from Chiappa [RFC1753].
Instead, IPv6 has been put forth as the IPng. Without entering a
discussion of the relative merits of IPv6 versus Nimrod, it is
Davies & Doria Historic [Page 31]RFC 5773 IDR History February 2010
apparent that IPv6, while it may solve many problems, does not solve
the critical routing problems in the Internet today. In fact, in
some sense, it exacerbates them by adding a requirement for support
of two Internet protocols and their respective addressing methods.
In many ways, the addition of IPv6 to the mix of methods in today's
Internet only points to the fact that the goals, as set forth by the
Nimrod team, remain as necessary goals.
There is another sense in which the study of Nimrod and its
architecture may be important to deriving a future domain-based
routing architecture. Nimrod can be said to have two derivatives:
o Multi-Protocol Label Switching (MPLS), in that it took the notion
of forwarding along well-known paths.
o Private Network-Node Interface (PNNI), in that it took the notion
of abstracting topological information and using that information
to create connections for traffic.
It is important to note, that whilst MPLS and PNNI borrowed ideas
from Nimrod, neither of them can be said to be an implementation of
this architecture.
3.4. PNNI
The Private Network-Node Interface (PNNI) routing protocol was
developed under the ATM Forum's auspices as a hierarchical route
determination protocol for ATM, a connection-oriented architecture.
It is reputed to have developed several of its methods from a study
of the Nimrod architecture. What can be gained from an analysis of
what did and did not succeed in PNNI?
The PNNI protocol includes the assumption that all peer groups are
willing to cooperate, and that the entire network is under the same
top administration. Are there limitations that stem from this "world
node" presupposition? As discussed in [RFC3221], the Internet is no
longer a clean hierarchy, and there is a lot of resistance to having
any sort of "ultimate authority" controlling or even brokering
communication.
PNNI is the first deployed example of a routing protocol that uses
abstract map exchange (as opposed to distance-vector or link-state
mechanisms) for inter-domain routing information exchange. One
consequence of this is that domains need not all use the same
mechanism for map creation. What were the results of this
abstraction and source-based route calculation mechanism?
Davies & Doria Historic [Page 32]RFC 5773 IDR History February 2010
Since the authors of this document do not have experience running a
PNNI network, the comments above are from a theoretical perspective.
Further research on these issues based on operational experience is
required.
4. Recent Research Work
4.1. Developments in Internet Connectivity
The work commissioned from Geoff Huston by the Internet Architecture
Board [RFC3221] draws a number of conclusions from the analysis of
BGP routing tables and routing registry databases:
o The connectivity between provider ASs is becoming more like a
dense mesh than the tree structure that was commonly assumed to be
commonplace a couple of years ago. This has been driven by the
increasing amounts charged for peering and transit traffic by
global service providers. Local direct peering and Internet
exchanges are becoming steadily more common as the cost of local
fibre connections drops.
o End-user sites are increasingly resorting to multi-homing onto two
or more service providers as a way of improving resiliency. This
has a knock-on effect of spectacularly fast depletion of the
available pool of AS numbers as end-user sites require public AS
numbers to become multi-homed and corresponding increase in the
number of prefixes advertised in BGP.
o Multi-homed sites are using advertisement of longer prefixes in
BGP as a means of traffic engineering to load spread across their
multiple external connections with further impact on the size of
the BGP tables.
o Operational practices are not uniform, and in some cases lack of
knowledge or training is leading to instability and/or excessive
advertisement of routes by incorrectly configured BGP speakers.
o All these factors are quickly negating the advantages in limiting
the expansion of BGP routing tables that were gained by the
introduction of Classless Inter-Domain Routing (CIDR) and
consequent prefix aggregation in BGP. It is also now impossible
for IPv6 to realize the worldview in which the default-free zone
would be limited to perhaps 10,000 prefixes.
o The typical "width" of the Internet in AS hops is now around five,
and much less in many cases.
Davies & Doria Historic [Page 33]RFC 5773 IDR History February 2010
These conclusions have a considerable impact on the requirements for
the future domain-based routing architecture:
o Topological hierarchy (e.g., mandating a tree-structured
connectivity) cannot be relied upon to deliver scalability of a
large Internet routing system.
o Aggregation cannot be relied upon to constrain the size of routing
tables for an all-informed routing system.
4.2. DARPA NewArch Project
DARPA funded a project to think about a new architecture for future
generation Internet, called NewArch (see
http://www.isi.edu/newarch/). Work started in the first half of 2000
and the main project finished in 2003 [NewArch03].
The main development is to conclude that as the Internet becomes
mainstream infrastructure, fewer and fewer of the requirements are
truly global but may apply with different force or not at all in
certain parts of the network. This (it is claimed) makes the
compilation of a single, ordered list of requirements deeply
problematic. Instead, we may have to produce multiple requirement
sets with support for differing requirement importance at different
times and in different places. This "meta-requirement" significantly
impacts architectural design.
Potential new technical requirements identified so far include:
o Commercial environment concerns such as richer inter-provider
policy controls and support for a variety of payment models
o Trustworthiness
o Ubiquitous mobility
o Policy driven self-organization ("deep auto-configuration")
o Extreme short-timescale resource variability
o Capacity allocation mechanisms
o Speed, propagation delay, and delay/bandwidth product issues
Non-technical or political "requirements" include:
o Legal and Policy drivers such as
Davies & Doria Historic [Page 34]RFC 5773 IDR History February 2010
* Privacy and free/anonymous speech
* Intellectual property concerns
* Encryption export controls
* Law enforcement surveillance regulations
* Charging and taxation issues
o Reconciling national variations and consistent operation in a
worldwide infrastructure
The conclusions of the work are now summarized in the final report
[NewArch03].
4.2.1. Defending the End-to-End Principle
One of the participants in DARPA NewArch work (Dave Clark) with one
of his associates has also published a very interesting paper
analyzing the impact of some of the new requirements identified in
NewArch (see Section 4.2) on the end-to-end principle that has guided
the development of the Internet to date [Clark00]. Their primary
conclusion is that the loss of trust between the users at the ends of
end-to-end has the most fundamental effect on the Internet. This is
clear in the context of the routing system, where operators are
unwilling to reveal the inner workings of their networks for
commercial reasons. Similarly, trusted third parties and their
avatars (mainly midboxes of one sort or another) have a major impact
on the end-to-end principles and the routing mechanisms that went
with them. Overall, the end-to-end principles should be defended so
far as is possible -- some changes are already too deeply embedded to
make it possible to go back to full trust and openness -- at least
partly as a means of staving off the day when the network will ossify
into an unchangeable form and function (much as the telephone network
has done). The hope is that by that time, a new Internet will appear
to offer a context for unfettered innovation.
5. Existing Problems of BGP and the Current Inter-/Intra-Domain
Architecture
Although most of the people who have to work with BGP today believe
it to be a useful, working protocol, discussions have brought to
light a number of areas where BGP or the relationship between BGP and
the intra-domain routing protocols in use today could be improved.
BGP-4 has been and continues to be extended since it was originally
introduced in [RFC1771] and the protocol as deployed has been
documented in [RFC4271]. This section is, to a large extent, a wish
Davies & Doria Historic [Page 35]RFC 5773 IDR History February 2010
list for the future domain-based routing architecture based on those
areas where BGP is seen to be lacking, rather than simply a list of
problems with BGP. The shortcomings of today's inter-domain routing
system have also been extensively surveyed in "Architectural
Requirements for Inter-Domain Routing in the Internet" [RFC3221],
particularly with respect to its stability and the problems produced
by explosions in the size of the Internet.
5.1. BGP and Auto-Aggregation
The initial stability followed by linear growth rates of the number
of routing objects (prefixes) that was achieved by the introduction
of CIDR around 1994, has now been once again been replaced by near-
exponential growth of number of routing objects. The granularity of
many of the objects advertised in the default-free zone is very small
(prefix length of 22 or longer): this granularity appears to be a by-
product of attempts to perform precision traffic engineering related
to increasing levels of multi-homing. At present, there is no
mechanism in BGP that would allow an AS to aggregate such prefixes
without advance knowledge of their existence, even if it was possible
to deduce automatically that they could be aggregated. Achieving
satisfactory auto-aggregation would also significantly reduce the
non-locality problems associated with instability in peripheral ASs.
On the other hand, it may be that alterations to the connectivity of
the net as described in [RFC3221] and Section 2.5.1 may limit the
usefulness of auto-aggregation.
5.2. Convergence and Recovery Issues
BGP today is a stable protocol under most circumstances, but this has
been achieved at the expense of making the convergence time of the
inter-domain routing system very slow under some conditions. This
has a detrimental effect on the recovery of the network from
failures.
The timers that control the behavior of BGP are typically set to
values in the region of several tens of seconds to a few minutes,
which constrains the responsiveness of BGP to failure conditions.
In the early days of deployment of BGP, poor network stability and
router software problems lead to storms of withdrawals closely
followed by re-advertisements of many prefixes. To control the load
on routing software imposed by these "route flaps", route-flap
damping was introduced into BGP. Most operators have now implemented
a degree of route-flap damping in their deployments of BGP. This
restricts the number of times that the routing tables will be
rebuilt, even if a route is going up and down very frequently.
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RFC 5773 IDR History February 2010
Unfortunately, route-flap damping responds to multiple flaps by
increasing the route suppression time exponentially, which can result
in some parts of the Internet being unreachable for hours at a time.
There is evidence ([RFC3221] and measurements by some of the Sub-
Group B members [Jiang02]) that in today's network, route flap is
disproportionately associated with the fine-grained prefixes (length
22 or longer) associated with traffic engineering at the periphery of
the network. Auto-aggregation, as previously discussed, would tend
to mask such instability and prevent it being propagated across the
whole network. Another question that needs to be studied is the
continuing need for an architecture that requires global convergence.
Some of our studies (unpublished) show that, in some localities at
least, the network never actually reaches stability; i.e., it never
really globally converges. Can a global, and beyond, network be
designed with the requirement of global convergence?
5.3. Non-Locality of Effects of Instability and Misconfiguration
There have been a number of instances, some of which are well
documented, of a mistake in BGP configuration in a single peripheral
AS propagating across the whole Internet and resulting in misrouting
of most of the traffic in the Internet.
Similarly, a single route flap in a single peripheral AS can require
route table recalculation across the entire Internet.
This non-locality of effects is highly undesirable, and it would be a
considerable improvement if such effects were naturally limited to a
small area of the network around the problem. This is another
argument for an architecture that does not require global
convergence.
5.4. Multi-Homing Issues
As discussed previously, the increasing use of multi-homing as a
robustness technique by peripheral networks requires that multiple
routes have to be advertised for such domains. These routes must not
be aggregated close in to the multi-homed domain as this would defeat
the traffic engineering implied by multi-homing and currently cannot
be aggregated further away from the multi-homed domain due to the
lack of auto-aggregation capabilities. Consequentially, the default-
free zone routing table is growing exponentially, as it was before
CIDR.
The longest prefix match routing technique introduced by CIDR, and
implemented in BGP-4, when combined with provider address allocation
is an obstacle to effective multi-homing if load sharing across the
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RFC 5773 IDR History February 2010
multiple links is required. If an AS has been allocated, its
addresses from an upstream provider, the upstream provider can
aggregate those addresses with those of other customers and need only
advertise a single prefix for a range of customers. But, if the
customer AS is also connected to another provider, the second
provider is not able to aggregate the customer addresses because they
are not taken from his allocation, and will therefore have to
announce a more specific route to the customer AS. The longest match
rule will then direct all traffic through the second provider, which
is not as required.
Example:
\ /
AS1 AS2
\ /
AS3
Figure 1: Address Aggregation
In Figure 1, AS3 has received its addresses from AS1, which means AS1
can aggregate. But if AS3 wants its traffic to be seen equally both
ways, AS3 is forced to announce both the aggregate and the more
specific route to AS2.
This problem has induced many ASs to apply for their own address
allocation even though they could have been allocated from an
upstream provider further exacerbating the default-free zone route
table size explosion. This problem also interferes with the desire
of many providers in the default-free zone to route only prefixes
that are equal to or shorter than 20 or 19 bits.
Note that some problems that are referred to as multi-homing issues
are not, and should not be, solvable through the routing system
(e.g., where a TCP load distributor is needed), and multi-homing is
not a panacea for the general problem of robustness in a routing
system [Berkowitz01].
Editors' Note: A more recent analysis of multi-homing can be found
in [RFC4116].
5.5. AS Number Exhaustion
The domain identifier or AS number is a 16-bit number. When this
paper was originally written in 2001, allocation of AS numbers was
increasing 51% a year [RFC3221] and exhaustion by 2005 was predicted.
Davies & Doria Historic [Page 38]RFC 5773 IDR History February 2010
According to some recent work again by Huston [Huston05], the rate of
increase dropped off after the business downturn, but as of July
2005, well over half the available AS numbers (39000 out of 64510)
had been allocated by IANA and around 20000 were visible in the
global BGP routing tables. A year later, these figures had grown to
42000 (April 2006) and 23000 (August 2006), respectively, and the
rate of allocation is currently about 3500 per year. Depending on
the curve-fitting model used to predict when exhaustion will occur,
the pool will run out somewhere between 2010 and 2013. There appear
to be other factors at work in this rate of increase beyond an
increase in the number of ISPs in business, although there is a fair
degree of correlation between these numbers. AS numbers are now used
for a number of purposes beyond that of identifying large routing
domains: multi-homed sites acquire an AS number in order to express
routing preferences to their various providers and AS numbers are
used part of the addressing mechanism for MPLS/BGP-based virtual
private networks (VPNs) [RFC4364]. The IETF has had a proposal under
development for over four years to increase the available range of AS
numbers to 32 bits [RFC4893]. Much of the slowness in development is
due to the deployment challenge during transition. Because of the
difficulties of transition, deployment needs to start well in advance
of actual exhaustion so that the network as a whole is ready for the
new capability when it is needed. This implies that standardization
needs to be complete and implementations available at least well in
advance of expected exhaustion so that deployment of upgrades that
can handle the longer AS numbers, should be starting around 2008, to
give a reasonable expectation that the change has been rolled out
across a large fraction of the Internet by the time exhaustion
occurs.
Editors' Note: The Regional Internet Registries (RIRs) are
planning to move to assignment of the longer AS numbers by default
on 1 January 2009, but there are concerns that significant numbers
of routers will not have been upgraded by then.
5.6. Partitioned ASs
Tricks with discontinuous ASs are used by operators, for example, to
implement anycast. Discontinuous ASs may also come into being by
chance if a multi-homed domain becomes partitioned as a result of a
fault and part of the domain can access the Internet through each
connection. It may be desirable to make support for this kind of
situation more transparent than it is at present.
Davies & Doria Historic [Page 39]RFC 5773 IDR History February 2010
5.7. Load Sharing
Load splitting or sharing was not a goal of the original designers of
BGP and it is now a problem for today's network designers and
managers. Trying to fool BGP into load sharing between several links
is a constantly recurring exercise for most operators today.
5.8. Hold-Down Issues
As with the interval between "hello" messages in OSPF, the typical
size and defined granularity (seconds to tens of seconds) of the
"keepalive" time negotiated at start-up for each BGP connection
constrains the responsiveness of BGP to link failures.
The recommended values and the available lower limit for this timer
were set to limit the overhead caused by keepalive messages when link
bandwidths were typically much lower than today. Analysis and
experiment ([Alaettinoglu00], [Sandiick00] and [RFC4204]) indicate
that faster links could sustain a much higher rate of keepalive
messages without significantly impacting normal data traffic. This
would improve responsiveness to link and node failures but with a
corresponding increase in the risk of instability, if the error
characteristics of the link are not taken properly into account when
setting the keepalive interval.
Editors' Note: A "fast" liveness protocol has been specified in
[Katz10].
An additional problem with the hold-down mechanism in BGP is the
amount of information that has to be exchanged to re-establish the
database of route advertisements on each side of the link when it is
re-established after a failure. Currently any failure, however brief
forces a full exchange that could perhaps be constrained by retaining
some state across limited time failures and using revision control,
transaction and replication techniques to resynchronize the
databases. Various techniques have been implemented to try to reduce
this problem, but they have not yet been standardized.
5.9. Interaction between Inter-Domain Routing and Intra-Domain Routing
Today, many operators' backbone routers run both I-BGP and an intra-
domain protocol to maintain the routes that reach between the borders
of the domain. Exporting routes from BGP into the intra-domain
protocol in use and bringing them back up to BGP is not recommended
[RFC2791], but it is still necessary for all backbone routers to run
both protocols. BGP is used to find the egress point and intra-
Davies & Doria Historic [Page 40]RFC 5773 IDR History February 2010
domain protocol to find the path (next-hop router) to the egress
point across the domain. This is not only a management problem but
may also create other problems:
o BGP is a path-vector protocol (i.e., a protocol that uses distance
metrics possibly overridden by policy metrics), whereas most
intra-domain protocols are link-state protocols. As such, BGP is
not optimized for convergence speed although distance-vector
algorithms generally require less processing power. Incidentally,
more efficient distance-vector algorithms are available such as
[Xu97].
o The metrics used in BGP and the intra-domain protocol are rarely
comparable or combinable. Whilst there are arguments that the
optimizations inside a domain may be different from those for end-
to-end paths, there are occasions, such as calculating the
"topologically nearest" server when computable or combinable
metrics would be of assistance.
o The policies that can be implemented using BGP are designed for
control of traffic exchange between operators, not for controlling
paths within a domain. Policies for BGP are most conveniently
expressed in Routing Policy Support Language (RPSL) [RFC2622] and
this could be extended if thought desirable to include additional
policy information.
o If the NEXT HOP destination for a set of BGP routes becomes
inaccessible because of intra-domain protocol problems, the routes
using the vanished next hop have to be invalidated at the next
available UPDATE. Subsequently, if the next-hop route reappears,
this would normally lead to the BGP speaker requesting a full
table from its neighbor(s). Current implementations may attempt
to circumvent the effects of intra-domain protocol route flap by
caching the invalid routes for a period in case the next hop is
restored through the "graceful restart" mechanism.
Editors' Note: This was standardized as [RFC4724].
o Synchronization between intra-domain and inter-domain routing
information is a problem as long as we use different protocols for
intra-domain and inter-domain routing, which will most probably be
the case even in the future because of the differing requirements
in the two situations. Some sort of synchronization between those
two protocols would be useful. In the RFC "IS-IS Transient
Blackhole Avoidance" [RFC3277], the intra-domain protocol side of
the story is covered (there is an equivalent discussion for OSPF).
Davies & Doria Historic [Page 41]RFC 5773 IDR History February 2010
o Synchronizing in BGP means waiting for the intra-domain protocol
to know about the same networks as the inter-domain protocol,
which can take a significant period of time and slows down the
convergence of BGP by adding the intra-domain protocol convergence
time into each cycle. In general, operators no longer attempt
full synchronization in order to avoid this problem (in general,
redistributing the entire BGP routing feed into the local intra-
domain protocol is unnecessary and undesirable but where a domain
has multiple exits to peers and other non-customer networks,
changes in BGP routing that affect the exit taken by traffic
require corresponding re-routing in the intra-domain routing).
5.10. Policy Issues
There are several classes of issues with current BGP policy:
o Policy is installed in an ad hoc manner in each autonomous system.
There isn't a method for ensuring that the policy installed in one
router is coherent with policies installed in other routers.
o As described in Griffin [Griffin99] and in McPherson [RFC3345], it
is possible to create policies for ASs, and instantiate them in
routers, that will cause BGP to fail to converge in certain types
of topology
o There is no available network model for describing policy in a
coherent manner.
Policy management is extremely complex and mostly done without the
aid of any automated procedures. The extreme complexity means that a
highly-qualified specialist is required for policy management of
border routers. The training of these specialists is quite lengthy
and needs to involve long periods of hands-on experience. There is,
therefore, a shortage of qualified staff for installing and
maintaining the routing policies. Because of the overall complexity
of BGP, policy management tends to be only a relatively small topic
within a complete BGP training course and specialized policy
management training courses are not generally available.
5.11. Security Issues
While many of the issues with BGP security have been traced either to
implementation issues or to operational issues, BGP is vulnerable to
Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks. Additionally, routers
can be used as unwitting forwarders in DDoS attacks on other systems.
Davies & Doria Historic [Page 42]RFC 5773 IDR History February 2010
Though DDoS attacks can be fought in a variety of ways, mostly using
filtering methods, it takes constant vigilance. There is nothing in
the current architecture or in the protocols that serves to protect
the forwarders from these attacks.
Editors' Note: Since the original document was written, the issue
of inter-domain routing security has been studied in much greater
depth. The rpsec working group has gone into the security issues
in great detail [RFC4593] and readers should refer to that work to
understand the security issues.
5.12. Support of MPLS and VPNS
Recently, BGP has been modified to function as a signaling protocol
for MPLS and for VPNs [RFC4364]. Some people see this overloading of
the BGP protocol as a boon whilst others see it as a problem. While
it was certainly convenient as a vehicle for vendors to deliver extra
functionality to their products, it has exacerbated some of the
performance and complexity issues of BGP. Two important problems are
that, the additional state that must be retained and refreshed to
support VPN (Virtual Private Network) tunnels and that BGP does not
provide end-to-end notification making it difficult to confirm that
all necessary state has been installed or updated.
It is an open question whether VPN signaling protocols should remain
separate from the route determination protocols.
5.13. IPv4/IPv6 Ships in the Night
The fact that service providers need to maintain two completely
separate networks, one for IPv4 and one for IPv6, has been a real
hindrance to the introduction of IPv6. When IPv6 does get widely
deployed, it will do so without causing the disappearance of IPv4.
This means that unless something is done, service providers would
need to maintain the two networks in perpetuity (at least on the
foreshortened timescale which the Internet world uses).
It is possible to use a single set of BGP speakers with multi-
protocol extensions [RFC4760] to exchange information about both IPv4
and IPv6 routes between domains, but the use of TCP as the transport
protocol for the information exchange results in an asymmetry when
choosing to use one of TCP over IPv4 or TCP over IPv6. Successful
information exchange confirms one of IPv4 or IPv6 reachability
between the speakers but not the other, making it possible that
reachability is being advertised for a protocol for which it is not
present.
Davies & Doria Historic [Page 43]RFC 5773 IDR History February 2010
Also, current implementations do not allow a route to be advertised
for both IPv4 and IPv6 in the same UPDATE message, because it is not
possible to explicitly link the reachability information for an
address family to the corresponding next-hop information. This could
be improved, but currently results in independent UPDATEs being
exchanged for each address family.
5.14. Existing Tools to Support Effective Deployment of Inter-Domain
Routing
The tools available to network operators to assist in configuring and
maintaining effective inter-domain routing in line with their defined
policies are limited, and almost entirely passive.
o There are no tools to facilitate the planning of the routing of a
domain (either intra- or inter-domain); there are a limited number
of display tools that will visualize the routing once it has been
configured.
o There are no tools to assist in converting business policy
specifications into the Routing Policy Specification Language
(RPSL) language (see Section 5.14.1); there are limited tools to
convert the RPSL into BGP commands and to check, post-facto, that
the proposed policies are consistent with the policies in adjacent
domains (always provided that these have been revealed and
accurately documented).
o There are no tools to monitor BGP route changes in real-time and
warn the operator about policy inconsistencies and/or
instabilities.
The following section summarizes the tools that are available to
assist with the use of RPSL. Note they are all batch mode tools used
off-line from a real network. These tools will provide checks for
skilled inter-domain routing configurers but limited assistance for
the novice.
5.14.1. Routing Policy Specification Language RPSL (RFC 2622 and RFC
2650) and RIPE NCC Database (RIPE 157)
Routing Policy Specification Language (RPSL) [RFC2622] enables a
network operator to describe routes, routers, and Autonomous Systems
(ASs) that are connected to the local AS.
Using the RPSL language (see [RFC2650]) a distributed database is
created to describe routing policies in the Internet as described by
each AS independently. The database can be used to check the
consistency of routing policies stored in the database.
Davies & Doria Historic [Page 44]RFC 5773 IDR History February 2010
Tools exist [IRRToolSet] that can use the database to (among other
things):
o Flag when two neighboring network operators specify conflicting or
inconsistent routing information exchanges with each other and
also detect global inconsistencies where possible;
o Extract all AS-paths between two networks that are allowed by
routing policy from the routing policy database; display the
connectivity a given network has according to current policies.
The database queries enable a partial-static solution to the
convergence problem. They analyze routing policies of a very limited
part of Internet and verify that they do not contain conflicts that
could lead to protocol divergence. The static analysis of
convergence of the entire system has exponential time complexity, so
approximation algorithms would have to be used.
The toolset also allows router configurations to be generated from
RPSL specifications.
Editors' Note: The "Internet Routing Registry Toolset" was
originally developed by the University of Southern California's
Information Sciences Institute (ISI) between 1997 and 2001 as the
"Routing Arbiter ToolSet" (RAToolSet) project. The toolset is no
longer developed by ISI but is used worldwide, so after a period
of improvement by RIPE NCC, it has now been transferred to the
Internet Systems Consortium (ISC) for ongoing maintenance as a
public resource.
6. Security Considerations
As this is an informational document on the history of requirements
in IDR and on the problems facing the current Internet IDR
architecture, it does not as such create any security problems. On
the other hand, some of the problems with today's Internet routing
architecture do create security problems, and these have been
discussed in the text above.
7. Acknowledgments
The document is derived from work originally produced by Babylon.
Babylon was a loose association of individuals from academia, service
providers, and vendors whose goal was to discuss issues in Internet
routing with the intention of finding solutions for those problems.
Davies & Doria Historic [Page 45]RFC 5773 IDR History February 2010
The individual members who contributed materially to this document
are: Anders Bergsten, Howard Berkowitz, Malin Carlzon, Lenka Carr
Motyckova, Elwyn Davies, Avri Doria, Pierre Fransson, Yong Jiang,
Dmitri Krioukov, Tove Madsen, Olle Pers, and Olov Schelen.
Thanks also go to the members of Babylon and others who did
substantial reviews of this material. Specifically, we would like to
acknowledge the helpful comments and suggestions of the following
individuals: Loa Andersson, Tomas Ahlstrom, Erik Aman, Thomas
Eriksson, Niklas Borg, Nigel Bragg, Thomas Chmara, Krister Edlund,
Owe Grafford, Susan Hares, Torbjorn Lundberg, David McGrew, Jasminko
Mulahusic, Florian-Daniel Otel, Bernhard Stockman, Tom Worster, and
Roberto Zamparo.
In addition, the authors are indebted to the folks who wrote all the
references we have consulted in putting this paper together. This
includes not only the references explicitly listed below, but also
those who contributed to the mailing lists we have been participating
in for years.
The editors thank Lixia Zhang, as IRSG document shepherd, for her
help and her perseverance, without which this document would never
have been published.
Finally, it is the editors who are responsible for any lack of
clarity, any errors, glaring omissions or misunderstandings.
8. Informative References
[Alaettinoglu00]
Alaettinoglu, C., Jacobson, V., and H. Yu, "Towards Milli-
Second IGP Convergence", Work in Progress, November 2000.
[Berkowitz01]
Berkowitz, H. and D. Krioukov, "To Be Multihomed:
Requirements and Definitions", Work in Progress,
July 2001.
[Breslau90]
Breslau, L. and D. Estrin, "An Architecture for Network-
Layer Routing in OSI", Proceedings of the ACM symposium on
Communications architectures & protocols , 1990.
[Chapin94]
Piscitello, D. and A. Chapin, "Open Systems Networking:
TCP/IP & OSI", Addison-Wesley Copyright assigned to
authors, 1994, <http://www.interisle.net/OSN/OSN.html>.
Davies & Doria Historic [Page 46]RFC 5773 IDR History February 2010
[Chiappa91]
Chiappa, J., "A New IP Routing and Addressing
Architecture", Work in Progress, 1991.
[Clark00] Clark, D. and M. Blumenthal, "Rethinking the design of the
Internet: The end to end arguments vs. the brave new
world", August 2000,
<http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/1519>.
[Griffin99]
Griffin, T. and G. Wilfong, "An Analysis of BGP
Convergence Properties", Association for Computing
Machinery Proceedings of SIGCOMM '99, 1999.
[Huitema90]
Huitema, C. and W. Dabbous, "Routeing protocols
development in the OSI architecture", Proceedings of
ISCIS V Turkey, 1990.
[Huston05]
Huston, G., "Exploring Autonomous System Numbers", The ISP
Column , August 2005,
<http://www.potaroo.net/ispcol/2005-08/as.html>.
[INARC89] Mills, D., Ed. and M. Davis, Ed., "Internet Architecture
Workshop: Future of the Internet System Architecture and
TCP/IP Protocols - Report", Internet Architecture Task
Force INARC, 1990, <http://www.eecis.udel.edu/~mills/
database/papers/inarc.pdf>.
[IRRToolSet]
Internet Systems Consortium, "Internet Routing Registry
Toolset Project", IRR Tool Set Website, 2006,
<http://www.isc.org/index.pl?/sw/IRRToolSet/>.
[ISO10747]
ISO/IEC, "Protocol for Exchange of Inter-Domain Routeing
Information among Intermediate Systems to support
Forwarding of ISO 8473 PDUs", International Standard
10747 , 1993.
[Jiang02] Jiang, Y., Doria, A., Olsson, D., and F. Pettersson,
"Inter-domain Routing Stability Measurement", 2002,
<http://psg.com/~avri/papers/paper-yong-
hpsr2002-final.pdf>.
[Katz10] Katz, D. and D. Ward, "Bidirectional Forwarding
Detection", Work in Progress, January 2010.
Davies & Doria Historic [Page 47]RFC 5773 IDR History February 2010
[Labovitz02]
Labovitz, C., Ahuja, A., Farnam, J., and A. Bose,
"Experimental Measurement of Delayed Convergence", NANOG ,
2002.
[NewArch03]
Clark, D., Sollins, K., Wroclawski, J., Katabi, D., Kulik,
J., Yang, X., Braden, R., Faber, T., Falk, A., Pingali,
V., Handley, M., and N. Chiappa, "New Arch: Future
Generation Internet Architecture", December 2003,
<http://www.isi.edu/newarch/iDOCS/final.finalreport.pdf>.
[RFC0904] Mills, D., "Exterior Gateway Protocol formal
specification", RFC 904, April 1984.
[RFC0975] Mills, D., "Autonomous confederations", RFC 975,
February 1986.
[RFC1105] Lougheed, K. and J. Rekhter, "Border Gateway Protocol
(BGP)", RFC 1105, June 1989.
[RFC1126] Little, M., "Goals and functional requirements for inter-
autonomous system routing", RFC 1126, October 1989.
[RFC1163] Lougheed, K. and Y. Rekhter, "Border Gateway Protocol
(BGP)", RFC 1163, June 1990.
[RFC1267] Lougheed, K. and Y. Rekhter, "Border Gateway Protocol 3
(BGP-3)", RFC 1267, October 1991.
[RFC1752] Bradner, S. and A. Mankin, "The Recommendation for the IP
Next Generation Protocol", RFC 1752, January 1995.
[RFC1753] Chiappa, J., "IPng Technical Requirements Of the Nimrod
Routing and Addressing Architecture", RFC 1753,
December 1994.
[RFC1771] Rekhter, Y. and T. Li, "A Border Gateway Protocol 4
(BGP-4)", RFC 1771, March 1995.
[RFC1992] Castineyra, I., Chiappa, N., and M. Steenstrup, "The
Nimrod Routing Architecture", RFC 1992, August 1996.
[RFC2362] Estrin, D., Farinacci, D., Helmy, A., Thaler, D., Deering,
S., Handley, M., and V. Jacobson, "Protocol Independent
Multicast-Sparse Mode (PIM-SM): Protocol Specification",
RFC 2362, June 1998.
Davies & Doria Historic [Page 48]RFC 5773 IDR History February 2010
[RFC2622] Alaettinoglu, C., Villamizar, C., Gerich, E., Kessens, D.,
Meyer, D., Bates, T., Karrenberg, D., and M. Terpstra,
"Routing Policy Specification Language (RPSL)", RFC 2622,
June 1999.
[RFC2650] Meyer, D., Schmitz, J., Orange, C., Prior, M., and C.
Alaettinoglu, "Using RPSL in Practice", RFC 2650,
August 1999.
[RFC2791] Yu, J., "Scalable Routing Design Principles", RFC 2791,
July 2000.
[RFC3221] Huston, G., "Commentary on Inter-Domain Routing in the
Internet", RFC 3221, December 2001.
[RFC3277] McPherson, D., "Intermediate System to Intermediate System
(IS-IS) Transient Blackhole Avoidance", RFC 3277,
April 2002.
[RFC3345] McPherson, D., Gill, V., Walton, D., and A. Retana,
"Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) Persistent Route
Oscillation Condition", RFC 3345, August 2002.
[RFC3618] Fenner, B. and D. Meyer, "Multicast Source Discovery
Protocol (MSDP)", RFC 3618, October 2003.
[RFC3765] Huston, G., "NOPEER Community for Border Gateway Protocol
(BGP) Route Scope Control", RFC 3765, April 2004.
[RFC3913] Thaler, D., "Border Gateway Multicast Protocol (BGMP):
Protocol Specification", RFC 3913, September 2004.
[RFC4116] Abley, J., Lindqvist, K., Davies, E., Black, B., and V.
Gill, "IPv4 Multihoming Practices and Limitations",
RFC 4116, July 2005.
[RFC4204] Lang, J., "Link Management Protocol (LMP)", RFC 4204,
October 2005.
[RFC4271] Rekhter, Y., Li, T., and S. Hares, "A Border Gateway
Protocol 4 (BGP-4)", RFC 4271, January 2006.
[RFC4364] Rosen, E. and Y. Rekhter, "BGP/MPLS IP Virtual Private
Networks (VPNs)", RFC 4364, February 2006.
[RFC4593] Barbir, A., Murphy, S., and Y. Yang, "Generic Threats to
Routing Protocols", RFC 4593, October 2006.
Davies & Doria Historic [Page 49]RFC 5773 IDR History February 2010
[RFC4601] Fenner, B., Handley, M., Holbrook, H., and I. Kouvelas,
"Protocol Independent Multicast - Sparse Mode (PIM-SM):
Protocol Specification (Revised)", RFC 4601, August 2006.
[RFC4724] Sangli, S., Chen, E., Fernando, R., Scudder, J., and Y.
Rekhter, "Graceful Restart Mechanism for BGP", RFC 4724,
January 2007.
[RFC4760] Bates, T., Chandra, R., Katz, D., and Y. Rekhter,
"Multiprotocol Extensions for BGP-4", RFC 4760,
January 2007.
[RFC4893] Vohra, Q. and E. Chen, "BGP Support for Four-octet AS
Number Space", RFC 4893, May 2007.
[RFC5772] Doria, A., Davies, E., and F. Kastenholz, "A Set of
Possible Requirements for a Future Routing Architecture",
RFC 5772, February 2010.
[Sandiick00]
Sandick, H., Squire, M., Cain, B., Duncan, I., and B.
Haberman, "Fast LIveness Protocol (FLIP)", Work
in Progress, February 2000.
[Tsuchiya87]
Tsuchiya, P., "An Architecture for Network-Layer Routing
in OSI", Proceedings of the ACM workshop on Frontiers in
computer communications technology , 1987.
[Xu97] Xu, Z., Dai, S., and J. Garcia-Luna-Aceves, "A More
Efficient Distance Vector Routing Algorithm", Proc IEEE
MILCOM 97, Monterey, California, Nov 1997, <http://
www.cse.ucsc.edu/research/ccrg/publications/
zhengyu.milcom97.pdf>.
Davies & Doria Historic [Page 50]RFC 5773 IDR History February 2010
Authors' Addresses
Elwyn B. Davies
Folly Consulting
Soham, Cambs
UK
Phone: +44 7889 488 335
EMail: elwynd@dial.pipex.com
Avri Doria
LTU
Lulea, 971 87
Sweden
Phone: +1 401 663 5024
EMail: avri@acm.org
Davies & Doria Historic [Page 51]
