Gang, As some of you may know, my students and I have been working of a way to reduce DFZ FIB size in routers using a technique that requires only modifications in router configuration...no software or protocol changes are needed...and that can be independently deployed by individual ISPs. The approach is called Virtual Aggregation (VA), because effectively what it does is create virtual (MPLS tunneled) networks around "virtual prefixes" (i.e. the collection of destinations within a large, otherwise unaggregatable prefix like a /7). VA has a trade-off of increasing path-length and load with shrinking the FIB, but the increase is negligible for even a 10x FIB reduction, which can extend the lifetime of a router for years.
I was giving a talk on this at the last RIPE, and Jari Arkko suggested that I should see if GROW is interested in pursuing this. (It doesn't appear appropriate for either RRG or IDR, in effect because those groups are looking at mechinisms that actually change routers.) The idea would be to have GROW flush out and improve the basic approach we have specified so far, with a goal of writing a best practices type RFC. Details of VA can be found in http://www.cs.cornell.edu/people/francis/va-wp.pdf. I'd be very willing to turn this into an I-D that could be discussed in Dublin. I need to point out that Cornell owns IPR on this. Though Cornell hasn't released an official statement about it, at worst it would be offered on fair and reasonable terms, and at best for free with no restrictions. Thanks, PF ps. We have an analogous piece of work that effectively eliminates the FIB for L3-VPN entries, but that is probably a topic for a different WG. _______________________________________________ GROW mailing list [email protected] https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/grow
