[RRG] ILNP Concept of Operations

[Randall Atkinson <rja@extremenetworks.com>]

% A New Internet-Draft is available from the on-line Internet-Drafts
% directories.
%
%        Title           : ILNP Concept of Operations
%        Author(s)     : R. Atkinson
%        Filename     : draft-rja-ilnp-intro-00.txt
%        Pages         : 11
%        Date           : 2008-2-16
%
% This document is a contribution to the IRTF Routing Research Group.
%  It is NOT a contribution to the IETF or to any IETF Working Group
%  or to any IETF Area.
%
%  This documents the Concept of Operations for an experimental
%  extension to IPv6 which is known as the Identifier Locator
%  network protocol.
%
%
%  A URL for this Internet-Draft is:
%    http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-rja-ilnp-intro-00.txt

At the start of this decade, along with some other folks here, I was
part of the IRTF's Namespace Research Group (NSRG).  The NSRG
examined some architectural questions about whether the Internet
Architecture had a sufficiently rich set of namespaces.  This research
was in part triggered by Mike O'Dell's proposals for IPv6 in the late 1990s.
The NSRG seemed to operate under rules whereby a unanimous conclusion
was required to make a formal recommendation to the IETF.

(NB: Please understand that the above proposal is *different*
from GSE or O'Dell's "8+8", and please leave behind any prior views
on that work when looking at this work.  The above is in the "8+8 Class"
of approaches, but it differs in various ways from O'Dell's work, and
so it deserves independent thought and analysis. :-)

I kept pondering those issues even after the NSRG ceased
being very active.  More recently, I spent a sabbatical collaborating
with some UK academic folks in this area.  Subsequently, we've
published various research papers (e.g. in ACM MobiArch 2007)
on the topic over the past few years.

The above I-D was written in some great haste last weekend,
but gives a flavour of the concept that I've been working
on for the past several years.  Given time, I'll try to revise the
above to be more clear and specific.  I also anticipate writing
some related I-Ds that describe the specific mechanisms in
more detail.  (Those details exist in other publications already,
but need to be reworked into an I-D form, and to reflect some
early implementation experience.)

The fundamental premise of this is that while the "problems"
we currently see are in the routing area (e.g. RIB/FIB size and
growth rates), the root origins lie in an insufficiently rich set of
namespaces within the Internet Architecture at present and other
architectural constraints at present.

This proposes to evolve IPv6, in an incrementally deployable,
and backwards compatible/interoperable way, to increase the
namespace richness and ameliorate a range of issues, including
those being discussed here.

On the front end of this research, the RIB/FIB issue was not
so widely perceived to be a burning issue.  So the initial benefits
were perceived to lie in other areas.  However, this proposed
evolution will also resolve the FIB/RIB issues because it moves
multi-homing functions into hosts and out of the DFZ RIB/FIB.

I'm coding up a minimalist "proof of concept" implementation
in FreeBSD in the background.  Since I'm only one person, and
I don't have a team working on this,  I do NOT expect that my
proof-of-concept code would be useful to others trying to build
any sort of production or pre=production code.  For now,
I'm not going to have the time to build a full implementation
to give away -- though I'd be happy to chat offlist if other folks
felt inclined to build an implementation (either freeware or
targeted at  one's own systems).

Cheers,

Ran Atkinson
rja@extremenetworks.com

(PS:  In a moment, I'm headed overseas.  I will not have
consistent access to email whilst travelling.  I'll try to sort
through whatever feedback arose after I get back. :-)

PPS: For those who might not know, I was part of the team
with the very very first IPv6 implementation on the planet
(at NRL), later worked on Cisco's first IPv6 implementation
for IOS (which Pedro no doubt reworked) and a 3rd IPv6
implementation since then.  So I've spent a fair part of
the past decade on IPv6. :-)


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