Hi WG,

It was suggested that we post this design ahead of the hackathon and WG
meeting just in case there are comments and suggestions. Since one
important focus of the WG is on addressing issues supporting real
deployment, and this design arises in our target deployment at LHCONE, we
feel that we should discuss this with the WG early.

In the context of deploying ALTO at LHCONE, one main issue is that LHCONE
is a multi-domain network: see slide 3 (
https://indico.cern.ch/event/1110783/contributions/4688996/attachments/2417086/4136448/2022-03-29_ECapone_LHCONE_L3VPN.pdf).
As a result, to fully implement the ALTO endpoint cost service (or cost
map), we will need to represent the full path spanning multiple domains
from the source to the destination. Requiring that each network on the path
reveal its internals is not practical, so we need to extend the current
ALTO protocol to represent the properties of, potentially multiple, not
fully revealed paths.

Here is the current openalto design: it introduces a new representation of
paths. In particular, it allows the path from a src to a dst to be a
directed acyclic graph: with the following components:

* A set of nodes, where each node has both a type, and attributes, where
the type can be
    - host: such as src/dst, with attributes such as IP address
    - AS: which is a group of nodes, i.e., subgraph, with attributes
including ASN
    - router, with subtypes such as BGP-router, with attributes such as IP
address

* A set of links, where each link has a head and a tail; hence the types of
links will be the unique combinations of head-type x tail type. A link can
have its attributes as well.

Now, some examples of this representation in the openalto deployment use
case:

- For the geo-distance ALTO cost derived from geo-ip: the src is a host and
the dst is also a host, and the metric is the geo distance;
- For CERN looking glass ALTO server, from a src host in CERN to a dst host
in another network, say KIT, the src is a host, with two links, one for
each of the two looking glass BGP routers from cern; each of these BGP
routers links to its BGP peer, and each such BGP peer links to the next AS,
in the AS-PATH exposed by CERN.The preceding representation is quite
general.

We are implementing this design for the coming Hackathon and will give more
details in follow up emails and the WG meeting on Friday. Any comments or
suggestions are greatly appreciated, since we may have time to adopt the
suggestions in the hackathon.

Thanks a lot.
Lauren, Jensen and Richard
_______________________________________________
alto mailing list
[email protected]
https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/alto

Reply via email to