Please indulge a newcomer to this debate, but this issue seems to be,
to put it mildly, fundamental. You can only achieve address aggregation,
thus control of the number of routes advertised in the DFZ, by alignment
of address allocation with network topology; hence provider allocation.
Achieving this aggregation with multi-homed sites is not entirely
straightforward, hence the "IPv6 multihoming" issue in the first place.
If however provider allocation is dead, the route load imposed by
multi-homing seems likely to be merely a modest incremental on the
overall DFZ route load imposed by an ever increasing number of FCFS
allocations.
Or have I missed something ...
Nigel
-----Original Message-----
From: Brian E Carpenter [SMTP:brian@hursley.ibm.com]
Sent: Friday, February 16, 2001 4:36 PM
To: Randy Bush
Cc: itojun@iijlab.net; Sean Doran; multi6@ops.ietf.org
Subject: *LA questions [was Re: initial issues]
Randy Bush wrote:
>
> > - a SLA, or a leaf site (/48)
> > - an NLA, or small ISP (/n, where n < 48)
> > - a TLA, or big ISP (/16, /29-35 sTLA, or /24-28 pTLA)
>
> please remove *LA terms. they are dead.
>
> the operational community learned long ago that, for many reasons, we can
> not say small/medium/large site/isp/registry. we start allocations with
> smaller windows and increase the window size based on actual utilization.
Randy, since I haven't seen any discussion of this on the ipngwg list
I will ask my two questions here - it seems to be key to multi6, although
the proposal to drop the *LA designations is a mainstream ipngwg issue
that I assume we will soon be debating there.
1. Are you asserting that concept of a site is dead? If not, then SLA
and /48 is definitely not dead. (If yes, then we have a big problem
but I won't argue it here and now.)
2. Are you asserting that concept of a hierarchy of providers is dead?
In other words do you think that the idea that lay behind the TLA/NLA
split - that local providers hang off less local providers - is totally
broken, or is it merely the definition of fixed boundaries in the
TLA..NLA portion of the address that is viewed as a problem? Note, I'm
not hung up at all on the terminology of "top level" and "next level".
I'm just trying to understand what you think will happen in the
topology.
Brian