What's really needed is a routing slot market (was: Using IPv6 withprefixes shorter than a /64 on a LAN)

Jamie Bowden jamie at photon.com
Mon Feb 7 14:25:01 UTC 2011


It would help if we weren't shipping the routing equivalent of the pre
DNS /etc/hosts all over the network (it's automated, but it's still the
equivalent).  There has to be a better way to handle routing information
than what's currently being done.  The old voice telephony guys built a
system that built SVCs on the fly from any phone in the world to any
other phone in the world; it (normally) took less than a second for it
to do it between any pair of phones under the NANPA, and only slightly
longer for international outside the US and Canada.  There have to be
things to be learned from there.

Jamie

-----Original Message-----
From: John Curran [mailto:jcurran at istaff.org] 
Sent: Sunday, February 06, 2011 11:00 AM
To: Mark Andrews
Cc: NANOG list
Subject: What's really needed is a routing slot market (was: Using IPv6
withprefixes shorter than a /64 on a LAN)

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:

Aggregation would be encouraged, since use of non-aggregatable address
space would entail addition costs. These costs might be seen as minimal 
for some organizations that desire addressing autonomy, but others might
decide treating their address space portable and routable results in 
higher cost than is desired. Decisions about changing prefixes with 
ISPs can be made based on a rational tradeoff of costs, rather than in
a thicket of ISP and registry policies.  

Conservation would actually be greatly improved, since address space 
would only be sought after because of the need for additional unique 
identifiers, rather than obtaining an address block of a given size 
to warrant implied routability.  In light of IPv6's vast address 
space, it actually would be possible to provide minimally-sized but
assured unique prefixes automatically via nearly any mechanism (i.e.
let your local user or trade association be a registry if they want)

With a significantly reduced policy framework, Registration could be
fully automated, with issuance being as simple as assurance the right
level of verification of requester identity (You might even get rid
of this, if you can assure that ISPs obtain clear identity of clients 
before serving them but that would preclude any form of reputation 
systems based on IP address prefix such as we have in use today...)

Just think: the savings in storage costs alone (from the reduction in 
address policy-related email on all our mailing lists) could probably
fund the system. :-)

Oh well, one project at a time...
/John






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