[Irtf-rr] Just an idea for a self organiziong IPv6 address space network

[Curtis Villamizar]

In message <pzvbs5c3oeh.wl@cordelia.lcs.mit.edu>, Xiaowei Yang writes:
> 
> just out of curiosity, can someone explain what "meshy networks" are?
> I understand Internet is no telephone network, and does not have a
> strict hierarchy. but the customer-provider relationship defines a
> hierarchical relationship, and two provider trees may be connected by
> horizontal peering links. so, why is the idea of self organizing
> address space so surprising?


There are at least a dozen providers who would consider themselves to
be "tier 1" and at the top of the IPv4 hierarchy.  There are other
providers connected to more than one "tier 1" provider.  Many second
tier providers and some large enterprises have so far flatly refused
to take address space from a higher level provider block, citing the
impossible task of renumbering all of the organizations that have
recieved numbers from them using current technology.

Historically the top level providers in particular have been known for
their reluctance to cooperate in the area of route registry.  They
want blocks of addresses and they want any other party to simply trust
that whatever routes they announce are valid.  I would expect far more
vigorous refusal to accept addresses dynamically and than the
reluctance to register routing information.

Providers have always cited a chicken and egg problem in dynamicly
learning such things as the IP addresses of routers.  (Routers are
needed to reach things and to reach things they need addresses).
Routers therefore have always had a configured set of addresses to
speed recovery in the event of a massive outage.  Routers don't rely
on other services such as DNS for this reason (a resolver is available
but cannot be needed to bring up services).

Any algorithm would have a tough time determining which of the few
thousand AS where top level vs some lower level.  One could argue that
this is a technically solvable problem.  It just may not be
politically solvable.

There are issues of security of this whole hierarchy.  ISPs like the
fact that if the rest of the Internet completely collapsed their IGP
would remain up and running and their direct customers would still be
served.  Not even DNS is a vulnerablity for an enterprise using such
an ISP and resolving their own domain locally or through the ISP.

By design, the Internet is a collection of more or less autonomous
networks glued together.  You are proposing adding a very fundamental
dependency on entities higher up in a hierarchy.  There is probably no
enterprise of over 100 emplyees willing to dynamically take addresses
from their provider such that if they went down (for example, due to
power outage) and found themselves up but isolated from their provider
they would not have an authoritative source of addresses.  This is
even more true for providers not wanting dependencies on others.

Even in a complete mesh, all nodes being equal with no hierarchy at
all, you could assert that in theory some sort of spanning tree could
assign numbers and in that way "organize the network".  In practice,
you don't have any chance of getting the Internet providers to adopt
it.  My advice is to direct your efforts elsewhere.

Curtis


> At Wed, 30 Oct 2002 00:24:22 +0300,
> Dmitri Krioukov wrote:
> > 
> > I perfectly understand Curtis's reply.
> > It would be quite surprising to know
> > how anything like this could work on
> > meshy networks. Some preliminary
> > calculations based on fundamental
> > Kleinrock's results on hierarchical
> > routing are included in:
> > http://www.krioukov.net/~dima/pro/lulea/lulea-msrw.ppt
> > --
> > dima.
> > 
> > _______________________________________________
> > irtf-rr mailing list
> > irtf-rr@puck.nether.net
> > http://puck.nether.net/mailman/listinfo/irtf-rr
> 
> _______________________________________________
> irtf-rr mailing list
> irtf-rr@puck.nether.net
> http://puck.nether.net/mailman/listinfo/irtf-rr
>