Subject: [GROW] draft of virtual aggregation

From: Paul Francis <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 13 Feb 2009 21:30:37 +0100

Hi Gang,

Xiaohu and myself have been developing an approach to FIB reduction called 
virtual aggregation.  Long story short, it allows a single ISP to shrink 
the demands on its router FIBs by upwards of an order of magnitude with 
negligible performance penalty (though not that RIB usage does not really 
change).  The upshot is that it extends the life of routers by many years, 
and this may be particularly important if routing tables shoot up as IPv4 
addresses deplete.

We've presented that at IDR the last couple meetings, and gotten much good 
feedback from that group, but in the end it was decided that GROW would be 
a more appropriate venue, in part because virtual aggregation requires no 
changes to the BGP wire protocol.

We want to announce the availability of a few drafts on this, the core 
draft (http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-francis-intra-va-00), and two 
companion drafts that describe how to use specific tunnels (
http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-francis-va-tunnels-mpls-00 and 
http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-xu-va-tunnels-gre-00).  Note that 
although this draft have a -00 version, this is actually the third 
revision. 

We hope to present these at GROW in SF.  Any comments greatly appreciated.

PF