Routing Area

Director(s):


   o Bob Hinden:  hinden@eng.sun.com


Area Summary reported by Bob Hinden/Sun Microsystems


Border Gateway Protocol Working Group (BGP) and
OSI IDRP for IP Over IP Working Group (IPIDRP)

The BGP and IPIDRP Working Groups met jointly.  BGP and IPIDRP will be
writing a joint usage document.  Implementors' experiences were
solicited for writing the Proposed Standard report by September for both
protocols.

BGP and IDRP will be forwarding final documents, plus the Proposed
Standard report, to the Routing Area Director so that BGP4 and IDRP can
go forward.  Both IPIDRP and BGP will be going into ``hiatus'' once the
standard requests are granted.


Inter-Domain Multicast Routing Working Group (IDMR)

The Amsterdam IETF meeting was the first official meeting of the IDMR
Working Group.  The working group met for two 2-hour sessions.

During the first session, Deborah Estrin gave a presentation on ESL, one
of the new proposals for inter-domain multicast routing.  This was the
result of a collaboration with Steve Deering, Dino Farinacci, and Van
Jacobson.  The motivation behind the design of ESL was, for groups with
a relatively small number of senders (sources), to allow receivers to
receive data from those sources either over a shared tree, or over a
shortest-path tree rooted at the source.  The latter is useful for
applications requiring minimal delay between senders and receivers.  It
was agreed that, because ESL is in its early stages of development,
there remain specification and engineering details that need to be
resolved.

The second session was mostly dedicated to discussing the IDMR charter.
It was unanimously agreed that the current charter is lacking with
respect to many aspects of inter-domain multicasting, and it should be a
goal of the working group to try to resolve many of these, for example,
user group management and interoperability.

The conclusion of this discussion was that the charter should be
re-worked and re-submitted to the area director after the items to be
worked on have been enumerated in order of priority.

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IP Routing for Wireless/Mobile Hosts Working Group (MOBILEIP)


The MOBILEIP Working Group met twice at the Amsterdam IETF, with only
one of the previously most active contributors unable to attend.
Outside of the working group meetings themselves considerable time was
spent over coffee tables, meals, and trains discussing the major issues.
There seems to be movement towards some common mechanisms (the question
of ``encapsulation'' versus ``source routing,'' for example, seems to
have been settled in favor of encapsulation).

There were reports on a user requirements document, as well as on
liaison activities with IEEE 802.11.  There were substantial discussions
about common terminology, beaconing, and how the location of a host is
discovered.  The creation of an ``IP encapsulation working group''
within the IETF was suggested.



RIP Version II (RIPV2)


The use of the Routing Domain in RIP-2 was discussed.  Its use is still
unclear.  It was determined that the use of the field could not be
sufficiently well defined to meet the varying needs of those few people
who would like to use it.  The field also poses difficult MIB problems
(discussed below).  Therefore, it has been decided to remove the field
from the protocol and leave a Must Be Zero field in its place.

There were two proposed changes to the MIB. The first was to deprecate
the Routing Domain object.  It has been pointed out that the tables
cannot be indexed correctly unless the Routing Domain object was used as
part of the index.  Given that the Routing Domain field is not well
defined, this change would result in an overall simplification of the
MIB. The second proposal dealt with handling unnumbered interfaces.
While the RIP-2 protocol does not expressly address them, their
existence does require consideration since the MIB tables cannot be
indexed properly with unnumbered interfaces.  The proposal is to use a
network number of zero and a host number of if_index to create a
suitable IP address for use in indexing tables.

There are currently two independent implementations of RIP-2:  gated and
Xylogics's routed.  The MIB has been implemented for gated.  ACC has a
partial implementation of RIP-2 and is planning to implement the
remainder.

Gerry Meyer's Demand Routing proposal was discussed at length.  It was
agreed that it performed a useful function.  It was pointed out that it
simulated many of the functions of TCP and that other routing protocols,
such as RAP, used TCP.

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Source Demand Routing (SDR)

Following a brief overview of the SDR forwarding protocol, Deborah
Estrin described successful experiments completed on small-scale network
testbeds including DARTnet.  Plans were made for continued
experimentation in conjunction with MERIT and others.  No changes have
been made to the specification since the last IETF; however a few very
minor changes are planned.

Tony Li presented a language for describing SDRP policies, and a simple
request-response protocol for exchanging this information.  The group
also reviewed the draft specification for optional-setup mode in SDRP.
The implementation of this functionality will be finished at the end of
the summer.  Drafts of the policy language and setup specification are
available now, and will submitted as Internet-Drafts in the coming month
or two.  In addition, a draft usage document and MIB will be submitted
as Internet-Drafts before the next IETF. At the next IETF Tony Li will
lead a detailed walk through of the SDRP specification.



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