[RRG] interesting presentations from RIPE

[Jari Arkko <jari.arkko@piuha.net>]

I'm sitting in the RIPE meeting in Berlin. So far there has been a
couple of interesting presentations related to route scaling.

Paul Francis made a presentation about how ISPs can configure their
(existing) routers to reduce the amount of FIB entries, and hopefully
with the extra configuration effort, buy some more time for the use of
their routers. The idea is based on partitioning the address space into
parts, assigning specific routers to deal with specific parts of the
address space, and using MPLS route traffic through the rest network.
The paper is here: http://www.cs.cornell.edu/people/francis/va-wp.pdf
and the presentation here:
http://rosie.ripe.net/ripe/meetings/ripe-56/presentations/uploads/Monday/Plenary%2016:00/upl/Karrenberg-IPv4_Prefix_Lengths.LGnt.pdf

This might be useful in terms of thinking about operational practices
that help ISPs cope with the route scalability problem. Not a long term
solution perhaps, but something that lets you live while an eventual
solution is being deployed. I'm sure there's other similar practices
that could be employed. Outside the charter of the RRG, of course, but
maybe useful work anyway.

Daniel Karrenberg and few others talked about routing table
fragmentation and why so many entries are /24s. His data points to the
direction that a big fraction of the advertised /24s are from
de-aggregations of bigger allocations. Obviously there are many reasons
for this, including traffic engineering, multihoming, etc. However, at
least for me it was news that one possible reason for doing this would
be to "protect" yourself against prefix hijacking. By advertising /24s
you reduce the likelihood of being hijacked with a more specific route.
If true, one action that needs to be taken to reduce routing scalability
problem is to secure the system in some proper way. Here are the
presentations:
http://rosie.ripe.net/ripe/meetings/ripe-56/presentations/uploads/Monday/Plenary%2016:00/upl/Karrenberg-IPv4_Prefix_Lengths.LGnt.pdf
http://rosie.ripe.net/ripe/meetings/ripe-56/presentations/uploads/Tuesday/Plenary%2014:00/upl/Karrenberg-Response_to_Prefix_Length_Question_from_Yesterday.xXAg.png

Have people here actually seen such "protection" as a reason for someone
to de-aggregate their prefixes?

Jari


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