Subject: I-D ACTION:draft-whittle-sram-ip-forwarding-01.txt

From: [email-masked]
Date: Mon, 02 Apr 2007 15:50:02 -0400

A New Internet-Draft is available from the on-line Internet-Drafts 
directories.

	Title		: SRAM-based IP Forwarding Eliminates the Need for Route Aggregation
	Author(s)	: R. Whittle
	Filename	: draft-whittle-sram-ip-forwarding-01.txt
	Pages		: 41
	Date		: 2007-4-2
	
I propose a simple, low-cost, low-power, Static RAM (SRAM) based
   architecture for the Forwarding Information Base (FIB) function of
   transit and border routers in the Default Free Zone (DFZ) of the
   Internet.  This will provide direct hardware forwarding irrespective
   of the size of the "global BGP routing table", within the current
   IPv4 convention of limiting advertised prefixes to no longer than
   /24.  Routers with this or a similar architecture provide the only
   elegant hardware solution to the problem of route disaggregation,
   which is unavoidable due to increasing numbers of ISPs and Autonomous
   System (AS) end-users who need to advertise their prefixes on
   topologically diverse parts of the network, for purposes including
   multihoming and traffic engineering.

   Router hardware limitations with respect to route disaggregation
   could also be eliminated for IPv6, by adding further SRAMs or, on a
   more limited basis, by using spare space in the SRAM which is
   required for IPv4.  Two additional SRAMs and a reallocation of the
   existing 2000::/3 global unicast allocations to a smaller range - for
   instance 2000::/10 - would provide for Provider Independent (PI) /32
   allocations to 4 million ISPs and multihomed end-users.  Each /32
   assignment could be advertised as up to eight /35 prefixes - each of
   which provides 8192 /48 user networks.  A less disruptive alternative
   to reallocating existing IPv6 global unicast addresses would be to
   define a /10 prefix - inside or outside 2000::/3 - for new PI
   assignments to ISPs and AS end-users with the long-term assurance of
   rapid SRAM-based forwarding for prefixes as short as /35, without
   concern for route aggregation or network topology.  It may be
   feasible, for a decade or more, to handle IPv6 without an addition
   SRAM chip.  Unused space in the IPv4 chip (or two chips for larger
   routers) would map 2,097,152 /35 prefixes - for instance to support
   PI assignments of /32 prefixes to 262,144 ISPs and AS end-users.
   This would provide 17 billion /48 prefixes - the standard assignment
   for non-AS end-users.

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