What's really needed is a routing slot market

Sun Feb 6 21:23:08 UTC 2011

On Sun, Feb 6, 2011 at 12:15 PM, Joel Jaeggli <joelja at bogus.com> wrote:
> On 2/6/11 8:00 AM, John Curran wrote:
>> On Feb 5, 2011, at 9:40 PM, Mark Andrews wrote:
>>> What's really needed is seperate the routing slot market from the
>>> address allocation market.
>>
>> Bingo! In fact, having an efficient market for obtaining routing of a
>> given prefix, combined with IPv6 vast identifier space, could actually
>> satisfy the primary goals that we hold for a long-term scalable address
>> architecture, and enable doing it in a highly distributed, automatable
>> fashion:
>
> So assuming this operates on a pollution model the victims of routing
> table bloat are compensated by the routing table pollutors for the use
> of the slots which they have to carry. so I take the marginal cost of
> the slots that I need subtract the royalities I recieve from the other
> participants and if I'm close to the mean number of slots per
> participant then it nets out to zero.

Hi Joel,

It couldn't and wouldn't work that way. Here's how it could work:

Part 1: The Promise. If paid to carry a particular route (consisting
one specific network and netmask, no others) then barring a belief
that a particular received route announcement is fraudulent, a given
AS:

A. Will announce that route to each neighbor AS which pays for
Internet access if received from any neighbor AS, unless the specific
neighbor AS has asked to receive a restricted set of routes.
B. Will announce that route to every neighbor AS if received from any
neighbor AS who pays for Internet access, unless the specific neighbor
AS has asked to receive a restricted set of routes.
C. Will not ask any neighbor AS to filter the given route or any
superset from the list of routes offered on that connection.
D. Will assure sufficient internal carriage of the route within the
AS's network to reasonably meet responsibilities A, B and C, and
extend the route or a sufficient covering route to every non-BGP
customer of the network.

Part 2: The Payment. Each AS who wishes to do so will offer to execute
The Promise for any set of networks/netmasks requested by the
legitimate origin AS for a reasonable and non-discriminatory (RAND)
price selected by the AS based on reasonable estimates of the routing
slot costs. The preceding not withstanding, an AS may determine that a
particular route or AS is not eligible for carriage at any price due
to violations of that AS's terms of service. If such is determined,
the AS will not accept payment for carrying the route and will refund
any payments made for service during the period in which carriage is
not made.

Needless to say, the origin AS with two routers can offer a RAND fee
to carry routes, but not many will take them up on it. They'll have to
carry the route or institute a default route if they want to remain
fully connected. The folks who will get paid are the ones who
collectively are the backbone where you, as the origin, can't afford
for your route not to be carried. These are, of course, the same folks
who are presently the victims of routing pollution who pay the lion's
share of the $2B/yr routing slot costs yet have little choice but to
carry the routes.

Part 3: The Arbiter. One or several route payment centers collects the
RAND offerings and makes them available to origin ASes in bulk sets.
You write one check each month to the Arbiter and he collects your
routes with his other customers and makes the appropriate Payments for
the Promises.

Part 4: The Covering Routes. ARIN and the other RIRs auction the
rights to offer a covering route for particular /8's. The winner
announces the whole /8 but gets to break the RAND rule in the Payment
for covered routes. An origin AS can still choose to have everybody
carry his routes. But he can also choose to have just the paid paths
to the AS with the Covering Route carried, or some fraction of ASes
that includes those paid paths.  Or he could buy transit tunnels from
the Covering Route AS anchored to PA addresses from his individual
ISPs. Or he could do a mix of the two. Regardless, the origin AS ends
up with full reachability without needing his explicit route to be
carried the breadth of the Internet.

Note that I use the term "auction" very loosely. The winner could be
the qualified AS willing to pay a fixed nominal fee and promise the
lowest carriage fee / 95th percentile tunnel transit fee.

At any rate, you get a healthy potential for route aggregation through
payment selection by the origin AS. If more precise routing is worth
the money, they'll pay the slot cost. If not, they'll rely on the
covers. Or if it works out that a router costs $5M because it has to
carry 10M routes, who cares as long as you're being paid what it
costs?

> Yay?

Yay!

Regards,
Bill Herrin

-- 
William D. Herrin ................ herrin at dirtside.com  bill at herrin.us
3005 Crane Dr. ...................... Web: <http://bill.herrin.us/>
Falls Church, VA 22042-3004