Subject: [arch-d] What are the "right" architectural problems to addressing and routing, then?

From: Pekka Nikander <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 10 Nov 2006 08:57:01 +0200

Not having been at the routing and addressing workshop, not seeing  
yesterday's plenary presentation, and knowing only what is on  
yesterday's slides, my personal opinion is that focusing on "how to  
make IPv6 routing scale" is most probably a wrong problem (very  
symptomatic approach).

I think the right questions might be what Noel asked, but restating  
the most important one of those slightly more concretely:

   What are the things that we want to name and address?

I think the focus on hosts and processes running on hosts is a wrong  
answer.  Time to bite the bullet and acknowledge that the hosts in  
the Internet are no more very important.

There are at least three alternative ways to answer to a problem  
requiring naming changes:

1. Overload the current name spaces with new semantics
2. Change (completely) the semantics of an existing name space
3. Add a new name space

#1 has been what we have historically done most of the time.  CIDR is  
a good example of #2.  Changing IPv6 so that IPv6 addresses would no  
longer be host or interface addresses but perhaps something more fine  
grained might be another example of #2.  That could be combined with  
GSE and/or SHIM6, the workshop's favourite solutions.  HIP is  
probably the most mature of current architectural approaches in the  
#3 category, and apparently the EME RG is looking at others.   
Unfortunately, SIP and all that world is the best established  
approach overall, but IMHO not architecturally as clean as what I  
think HIP and other similar approaches are.  But it seems to be the  
way we are going: SIP URLs, signalling gateways between IP addressing  
domains, and separated IP networks.

Personally, I am somewhat worried about solutions in the first and  
second categories, including both GSE and SHIM6.  Structurally,  
solutions in #2 seem more or less like CIDR -- buying more time  
without changing anything fundamental.  As I stated, based on the  
systems theory pattern, such solutions are needed: symptomatic  
solutions are needed.  But we should not focus *only* on them.  But  
we should also discuss completely new approaches.

Hence, IMHO the danger here is that focusing too much on solutions  
that buy time in the face of yet another wall ahead is another round  
of completely ignoring the more fundamental problems.  When I worked  
towards the creating of this mailing list, I hoped that this would be  
a forum to ponder the more fundamental problems and solutions to them.

--Pekka Nikander

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From: "Fergie" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 10 Nov 2006 07:32:37 GMT

>   What are the things that we want to name and address?

I think the ISPs that are currently running the larger backbone
networks would disagree with you on that one.

In an environment with growth of $foo routes (where $foo is the
number, and projected numbers, of additional projected routes
discussed in the past few weeks/months), the principle concern
here is the instability introduced by route churn (given those
numbers) and may very well be problematic _at_best_.

So it's not just an issue of names and addresses, but rather,
how the addition of $foo routes, and the ability to recalculate
alternate paths in a timely manner, affects the routing system.

Without the ability to get bits from Point A to Point B, names
and addresses are meaningless.

- ferg