What's really needed is a routing slot market

Tue Feb 8 16:36:12 UTC 2011

On 02/08/2011 11:01 AM, Neil Harris wrote:
>
> They did indeed, but they did it by centrally precomputing and then 
> downloading centrally-built routing tables to each exchange, with 
> added statically-configured routing between telco provider domains, 
> and then doing step-by-step call setup, with added load balancing and 
> crankback on the most-favoured links in the static routing table at 
> each stage.
>
> All this works fine in a fairly static environment where there are 
> only a few, well-known, and fairly trustworthy officially-endorsed 
> entities involved within each country, and topology changes could be 
> centrally planned.
>
> BGP is a hack, but it's a hack that works. I'm not sure how PSTN-style 
> routing could have coped with the explosive growth of the Internet, 
> with its very large number or routing participants with no central 
> planning or central authority to establish trust, and an 
> endlessly-churning routing topology.
>
> Still, every good old idea is eventually reinvented, so it may have 
> its time again one day.

The way LNP works is a good example of PSTN style routing scaling. Each 
carrier has to have at least one NPA/NXX pair per switch, of which they 
pick one number they will never port out, and never assign to an end 
user, and declare that number as their LRN. There's nothing super 
special about this LRN, except that it's part of that NPA/NXX that's 
directly allocated to the carrier's switch as the original assignee.

When a phone call is made, a TCAP query is launched by the originating 
switch to a set of STPs that then route it to an LNP database, that has 
a full list of every ported number, and its LRN, and a few other tidbits 
of info. The switch then sees the LRN in the response, sets the called 
party number to the LRN, and then sets the "Generic Address Parameter" 
parameter in the ISUP message to the originally dialed number.

This tunnels it through a network that is unaware of LNP, and when the 
terminating switch sees its own LRN as the destination, it moves the 
Generic Address Parameter back to the Called Party Number and continues 
processing.

-Paul