Communications of the ACM
Ietf to Explore New Routing Technique
The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) is forming a new working group to address scalability issues in the Internet's routing system, which are caused by companies that divide their network traffic across multiple carriers. The working group will use a base proposal from Cisco to create the Locator/Identifier Separation Protocol (LISP), a new tunneling mechanism for the Internet's routers.
LISP is designed to reduce the number of entries in the routing tables stored in the core routers operated by Internet service providers. LISP separates Internet Protocol (IP) addresses that a company advertises to the Internet through its edge routers into two functions: the first for identifying the systems using the IP addresses, and the second for locating where those systems connect to the Internet. The separation enables LISP to collect location data so less information needs to be stored in the core routers. Every packet that enters the core routers is given a new IP wrapper that carries information on the destination service provider network rather than the end-user IP address. The wrapper is removed when the packet arrives at the destination service provider. LISP would work with the Border Gateway Protocol, the primary communications mechanism between edge and core routers.
LISP's developers say the protocol will be deployed as a software upgrade to edge routers, and that it will be incrementally deployable and can work with both IPv4 and IPv6. LISP developers expect the working group to be chartered by the IETF this summer, after which they will continue to work on prototypes and protocol documents.
From Network World
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