[RRG] a backwards compatible FIB scaling approach

[Paul Francis <francis@cs.cornell.edu>]

Gang,

Lately my student Hitesh Ballani and I (and more recently another student
Tuan Cao) have been working on a way to scale FIBs without requiring any
changes to routers or routing protocols, and without requiring and
coordination between ISPs.  Rather, it can all be done through configuration.
The basic idea is to split the IP address space into virtual prefixes, and
then run each prefix as a kind of VPN.  As far as we can tell, an ISP can
realistically get 5x to 10x reduction in FIB size with very little (a few
precentage) increase in load and latency.  (Or, looked at another way, an ISP
can extend the lifetime of its routers by many years without any real
performance hit.)

We've written up a short informal description of the idea, posted at
http://www.cs.cornell.edu/people/francis/va-wp.pdf.

This work doesn't have all the capabilities that I know the RRG is going
after (mobility, traffic engineering), but nevertheless I thought folks would
be interested.

Any comments appreciated.

PF

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