Subject: [RRG] Inviting people to join the RRG

From: Robin Whittle <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 07 Nov 2007 11:08:52 +1100

I wrote to the ARIN Public Policy Mailing List:

  http://lists.arin.net/pipermail/ppml/2007-November/009778.html

inviting people to join the RRG.  One member of the ARIN Advisory
Council responded appreciatively:

  "Thank you Robin for you invitation and your work in this area."

There is a lively discussion on PPML about "Effects of explosive
routing table growth on ISP behavior" and I titled my message "IRTF
RRG: finer allocation of IPv4 space".  I hope I represented the work
of the RRG reasonably well and did not give the impression I had any
official standing in the RRG.

We have five ITR-ETR proposals which are well enough defined to
permit detailed critiques, comparisons and discussion.  However,
things have been pretty quiet of late.

I am the only person to have attempted a comparison or critique of
of the proposals.  I haven't yet compared TRRP with the others.  It
is nearly 4 months since my Ivip proposal became available as an
Internet Draft - and 3 weeks since I proposed a solution to the
PMTUD problems faced by all these ITR-ETR proposals:

  http://www.firstpr.com.au/ip/ivip/pmtud-frag/

However, to date there has been no meaningful critique of either of
these two proposals.

I am not criticising any individuals, since I figure we are all
volunteers and have limits on the time and energy we can devote to
this project.  I still have things I want to write in response to
previous discussions.

I think it would be good to get some more people involved.
Especially those who are wrangling with RIR policies, facing
something of a train-wreck in the IPv4 area, and with IPv6 being as
awkward as ever to adopt - and providing no relief from the need for
more and more networks with IPv4 space.

Would anyone object to me writing a similar message to the RIPE
Address Policy list?  Perhaps someone else could invite
participation in the RRG?  Are there any other places we might seek
more hands on deck for the Good Ship RRG?

I know the "crisis in routing and addressing" stuff we are working
on relates largely to scalability of the BGP routing system, and is
not explicitly tied to IPv4 address depletion, but I am adamant that:

1 - IPv4 address depletion is the most urgent architectural problem
    facing the Internet - and far better recognised than BGP
    stability and router scaling problems with the growth of
    advertised prefixes.

2 - All the ITR-ETR schemes are capable of slicing and dicing IPv4
    address space in many more pieces, and in finer pieces, than
    is ever likely to be practical with BGP.

3 - Therefore, any of the ITR-ETR schemes could make a major
    contribution to the more efficient utilisation of IPv4 space.

4 - We are stuck with IPv4 for the next decade or so.  IPv6
    provides few, if any, benefits for ordinary end-users, is
    complex and is not ubiquitously supported by applications,
    firewalls etc.  No ordinary Internet user is likely to be happy
    with an IPv6-only address in the foreseeable future.

5 - IPv4 address space utilisation could easily be improved if there
    were suitable policies and slicing and dicing technologies.
    Ping responsive host rates in advertised space are around 4%:

       http://www.isi.edu/ant/address/
       http://www.isi.edu/~johnh/PAPERS/Heidemann07c.pdf
       http://www.firstpr.com.au/ip/host-density-per-prefix/

    Geoff Huston estimates the host utilisation rate is 5 to 20%:

http://www.ripe.net/ripe/meetings/ripe-55/presentations/huston-ipv4.pdf

    So there is plenty of room for improvement.

We are attempting to devise something really challenging here - and
I think more expertise, more energy and wider perspectives would be
very helpful.

 - Robin

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---

From: Iljitsch van Beijnum <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 21 Nov 2007 18:53:13 +0100

On 7 nov 2007, at 1:08, Robin Whittle wrote:

> Internet Draft

Can you send me the latest version of your draft (or a link) in  
private email?

> - and 3 weeks since I proposed a solution to the

>  http://www.firstpr.com.au/ip/ivip/pmtud-frag/

I only scanned this quickly (it's a bit long...), but it looks like a  
complex scheme in the same vain as Fred's MTU proposals. In my  
opinion, that's not the best way to handle this. First of all,  
operators need to make sure that they use decent MTUs after tunneling  
so that hosts that send 1500-byte packets won't get in trouble or lead  
to much, if any, MTU discovery. Second, tunnel endpoints should simply  
implement two sides of path MTU discovery: they should discover the  
maximum packets they can successfully send to the other endpoint, and  
they should set their own inbound MTU to that value minus the size of  
the header that's added. This is simple enough that it's possible to  
get it right and doesn't add much overhead.

>    stability and router scaling problems with the growth of

Ah, but that's a solved problem. RRG = research, IETF = engineering.  
IPv4 depletion = operation. We all know what needs to be done here. A  
wise man once said: just do it.

>    contribution to the more efficient utilisation of IPv4 space.

I'm not convinced. The issue isn't the number of places that need an  
address block, but the number of places that need an individual address.

>    with an IPv6-only address in the foreseeable future.

The alternative is NAT, which is worse.

>    Ping responsive host rates in advertised space are around 4%:

Meaningless. First of all, they also pinged unrouted space. Second,  
current Windows doesn't respond to pings. Third, there's NATs and  
firewalls. Fourth, not all systems are turned on 24/7. Fifth, this is  
an average that includes both stuff given out under the current fairly  
tight policies and large amounts of stuff given away to people who  
aren't using it anymore.

>    So there is plenty of room for improvement.

No. Any effort spent on getting back IPv4 space for new uses is wasted  
effort, because we need to move to IPv6 in the slightly longer run  
anyway.

> I think more expertise, more energy and wider perspectives would be

Again: no. We made our beds over the past 15 years. We have another  
few years to fluff the pillows, then it's time to go to sleep. Even if  
it's possible to go back and redo the IPv6 effort and arrive at  
substantially better results (debatable), it's too late for that now.  
The message should be: you have three more years to start running IPv6  
if you don't want to be left behind on a network that isn't going  
anywhere in the medium- to long term.

---

From: xuxiaohu 41208 <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 22 Nov 2007 00:08:48 +0100

> >    stability and router scaling problems with the growth of
I agree that a new Internet architecture should address both issues. Otherwise, Internet will need another evolution after we just finished an evolution for routing scalability purpose. If the routing scalability issue is not so urgent as imaged, we need to give the matter further thought.
> >    contribution to the more efficient utilisation of IPv4 space.
The current ITR-ETR schemes use IPv4 address as EID namespace, and they do make some contribution to the efficient utilization of IPv4 address space. But is that enough?  Provided that a new address space needs to be deployed as EID namespace sooner or later in order to provide enough address space, should we go ahead further to embed some useful features in this new namespace from the start, such as build-in security mechanism?
> >    with an IPv6-only address in the foreseeable future.
Agree. Sooner or later we will need a global unique EID namespace and locator namespace with enough space in order to realize ubiquitous communication. It's better not to patch the Internet architecture again and again because each upgrade will be a hard experience.

Best wishes,
Xiaohu XU