Prefix Taxonomy Ongoing Measurement & Inter Network Experiment
charter-ietf-ptomaine-01

Routing table growth has been an issue of much concern. Many have
talked about temporary methods to alleviate the drain on Internet
resources. In response to these discussions, aggregation and filtering
techniques to reduce the amount of routing information carried by
routers with global knowledge started to be considered.

The purpose of the Prefix Taxonomy Ongoing Measurement & Inter Network
Experiment WG is to consider and measure the problem of routing table
growth and possible interim methods for reducing the impact of routing
table resource consumption within a network and the global Internet.
The first step of the WG is to define the impacts on routing resource
consumption and to identify the problems facing routing scalability.

The next step is to develop suggestions for filtering and aggregating
prefixes to reduce an individual network's routing table size and route
processing load and to suggest possible knobs that result in the least
loss of reachability if such methods are determined to be feasible in
addressing the problem. This work may possibly define a framework for
larger efforts to address the problems facing interdomain routing
scalability.

GOALS:

1) To provide a clear definition of the problems facing Internet
Routing Scaling today. This includes routing table size and route
processing load.

2) To provide a taxonomy to describe prefix information for peer
review.

3) To collate measurements of routing table scaling data and publish a
reference list.

4) To discuss and document methods of filtering/aggregating prefix
information and to discuss and document what support from protocols
or vendor knobs that might be helpful in doing this. In addition,
to suggest policy guidelines to RIRs, LIRs and/or ISPs for
allocations and aggregations,etc. that may be useful.

5) To determine the long and short term effects of
filtering/aggregating
prefixes to reduce router resource consumption.

6) To develop methods of controlling policy information propagation in
order to limit the need for propagation of prefix sub-aggregates.

Some Relevant References:

http://www.antc.uoregon.edu/route-views/
http://www.pch.net/routing/BGP_table_size.html
http://moat.nlanr.net/AS
http://www.pch.net/documents/data/routing-tables/route-views.oregon-ix.
n
et/
http://www.employees.org/~tbates/cidr-report.html
http://www.telstra.net/ops/bgp/index.html
http://www.apnic.net/stats/bgp
http://www.merit.edu/ipma