[RRG] Inviting people to join the RRG

[Robin Whittle <rw@firstpr.com.au>]

I wrote to the ARIN Public Policy Mailing List:

  http://lists.arin.net/pipermail/ppml/2007-November/009778.html

inviting people to join the RRG.  One member of the ARIN Advisory
Council responded appreciatively:

  "Thank you Robin for you invitation and your work in this area."

There is a lively discussion on PPML about "Effects of explosive
routing table growth on ISP behavior" and I titled my message "IRTF
RRG: finer allocation of IPv4 space".  I hope I represented the work
of the RRG reasonably well and did not give the impression I had any
official standing in the RRG.

We have five ITR-ETR proposals which are well enough defined to
permit detailed critiques, comparisons and discussion.  However,
things have been pretty quiet of late.

I am the only person to have attempted a comparison or critique of
of the proposals.  I haven't yet compared TRRP with the others.  It
is nearly 4 months since my Ivip proposal became available as an
Internet Draft - and 3 weeks since I proposed a solution to the
PMTUD problems faced by all these ITR-ETR proposals:

  http://www.firstpr.com.au/ip/ivip/pmtud-frag/

However, to date there has been no meaningful critique of either of
these two proposals.

I am not criticising any individuals, since I figure we are all
volunteers and have limits on the time and energy we can devote to
this project.  I still have things I want to write in response to
previous discussions.

I think it would be good to get some more people involved.
Especially those who are wrangling with RIR policies, facing
something of a train-wreck in the IPv4 area, and with IPv6 being as
awkward as ever to adopt - and providing no relief from the need for
more and more networks with IPv4 space.

Would anyone object to me writing a similar message to the RIPE
Address Policy list?  Perhaps someone else could invite
participation in the RRG?  Are there any other places we might seek
more hands on deck for the Good Ship RRG?

I know the "crisis in routing and addressing" stuff we are working
on relates largely to scalability of the BGP routing system, and is
not explicitly tied to IPv4 address depletion, but I am adamant that:

1 - IPv4 address depletion is the most urgent architectural problem
    facing the Internet - and far better recognised than BGP
    stability and router scaling problems with the growth of
    advertised prefixes.

2 - All the ITR-ETR schemes are capable of slicing and dicing IPv4
    address space in many more pieces, and in finer pieces, than
    is ever likely to be practical with BGP.

3 - Therefore, any of the ITR-ETR schemes could make a major
    contribution to the more efficient utilisation of IPv4 space.

4 - We are stuck with IPv4 for the next decade or so.  IPv6
    provides few, if any, benefits for ordinary end-users, is
    complex and is not ubiquitously supported by applications,
    firewalls etc.  No ordinary Internet user is likely to be happy
    with an IPv6-only address in the foreseeable future.

5 - IPv4 address space utilisation could easily be improved if there
    were suitable policies and slicing and dicing technologies.
    Ping responsive host rates in advertised space are around 4%:

       http://www.isi.edu/ant/address/
       http://www.isi.edu/~johnh/PAPERS/Heidemann07c.pdf
       http://www.firstpr.com.au/ip/host-density-per-prefix/

    Geoff Huston estimates the host utilisation rate is 5 to 20%:

http://www.ripe.net/ripe/meetings/ripe-55/presentations/huston-ipv4.pdf

    So there is plenty of room for improvement.


We are attempting to devise something really challenging here - and
I think more expertise, more energy and wider perspectives would be
very helpful.

 - Robin


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