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Classless AS-based Addressing
draft-shi-v6ops-caba-00

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This is an older version of an Internet-Draft whose latest revision state is "Expired".
Authors Xingang Shi , Yan Yang , Zhiliang Wang , Jianping Wu , Xia Yin
Last updated 2017-02-24
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draft-shi-v6ops-caba-00
Internet Engineering Task Force                                 Shi, Ed.
Internet-Draft                                                      Yang
Intended status: Informational                                      Wang
Expires: August 28, 2017                                              Wu
                                                                     Yin
                                                          Tsinghua Univ.
                                                       February 24, 2017

                     Classless AS-based Addressing
                        draft-shi-v6ops-caba-00

Abstract

   Addressing is the foundation of routing and it impacts the routing
   scalability.  The IPv6 routing system will face severe scalability
   issue if the IPv6 addresses are recklessly used without careful
   aggregation strategy.  This draft describes an addressing scheme and
   the corresponding allocation scheme which can facilitate the
   aggregation of IPv6 addresses and keep the IPv6 inter-domain routing
   system from being overloaded.

Status of This Memo

   This Internet-Draft is submitted in full conformance with the
   provisions of BCP 78 and BCP 79.

   Internet-Drafts are working documents of the Internet Engineering
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   Internet-Drafts are draft documents valid for a maximum of six months
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   time.  It is inappropriate to use Internet-Drafts as reference
   material or to cite them other than as "work in progress."

   This Internet-Draft will expire on August 28, 2017.

Copyright Notice

   Copyright (c) 2017 IETF Trust and the persons identified as the
   document authors.  All rights reserved.

   This document is subject to BCP 78 and the IETF Trust's Legal
   Provisions Relating to IETF Documents
   (http://trustee.ietf.org/license-info) in effect on the date of
   publication of this document.  Please review these documents

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   carefully, as they describe your rights and restrictions with respect
   to this document.  Code Components extracted from this document must
   include Simplified BSD License text as described in Section 4.e of
   the Trust Legal Provisions and are provided without warranty as
   described in the Simplified BSD License.

Table of Contents

   1.  Introduction  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   2
   2.  Address format  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   2
   3.  ASN allocation  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   3
   4.  effects on the size of IPv6 inter-domain routing tables . . .   4
   5.  IANA Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   5
   6.  Security Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   5
   7.  Conclusions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   5
   8.  Normative References  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   5
   Authors' Addresses  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   5

1.  Introduction

   IP address fragment is one of the most contributing factors that
   cause scalability problems to the IPv4 inter-domain routing system.
   The IPv6 routing system will face severe scalability issue if the
   IPv6 addresses are recklessly used without careful aggregation
   strategy.  This document propose Classless AS-Based Addressing (CABA)
   scheme, which embeds 32 bits AS number (ASN) into the IPv6 address.
   If ASNs are properly allocated, CABA can facilitate aggregation of IP
   addresses and reduce the size of inter-domain routing tables.

2.  Address format

   The Classless AS-Based address has five fields of fixed lengths, as
   shown in Figure 1.

+---------+-------------+--------------+------------+--------/ /--------+
| IANA /8 | ASN Low /16 | ASN High /16 | Subnet /24 |   Interface /64   |
+---------+-------------+--------------+------------+--------/ /--------+

                Figure 1: Classless AS-Based address format

   IANA /8 field should be allocated by IANA.

   ASN Low /16 is the lower 16 bits of the AS number.

   ASN High /16 is the higher 16 bits of the AS number.

   Subnet /24 should be allocated by individual ASes according to their
   intra-domain routing policies.

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   Interface /64 is interface ID.

   All ASNs are assumed as 32 bits long.  For a legacy ASN of 16 bits,
   the higher 16 bits are filled with 0.  The document uses AS x.y to
   denote an ASN whose higher part is x and lower part is y.  For
   example, AS 199081 (0x309a9 in hex) is denoted as AS 3.2473, and the
   ASN Low /16 field and the ASN High /16 field are 0x09a9 and 0x0003
   respectively, as shown in Figure 2.

   +----------------+--------------------+----------------------------+
   | ASN in decimal | ASN in hexadecimal | IPv6 Block                 |
   +----------------+--------------------+----------------------------+
   | AS 0.2473      | 0x9a9              | [xx]09:a900::/40           |
   | AS 3.2473      | 0x309a9            | [xx]09:a900:300::/40       |
   +----------------+--------------------+----------------------------+

                   Figure 2: ASN and IPv6 Block examples

   In order to prevent routing scalability issues, any prefixes that are
   more specific than the allocated /40 should not be advertised into
   global routing system.  Meanwhile, IPv6 operator must filter BGP
   updates that contain information of more specific prefixes.

3.  ASN allocation

   To take advantage of this AS-based addressing scheme, this document
   suggests to allocate ASNs in a way similar to provider-aggregatable
   (PA) addresses, where each allocation is made by ASes instead of
   RIRs.

   Initially, a legacy 16-bit ASN is regarded as holding 65536 32-bit
   ASNs.  For example, AS 333 holds ASNs from 0.333 to 65535.333.
   Existing 32-bit ASNs are regarded as holding only one 32-bit ASN and
   it is not hold by any other AS.  For example, if 2.333 exists, AS 333
   holds ASNs 0.333, 1.333 and from 3.333 to 65535.333.  And each AS can
   use only one ASN for routing purpose and this ASN is the smallest
   among all ASNs it holds.

   When a new AS wants to obtain an ASN, it should choose a provider who
   holds several ASNs and ask for a unrouted ASN.  The provider should
   response by allocating an ASN or a range of ASNs from its ASN pool
   according to its policy.  Each AS can have its own allocation policy
   but must conform to the following guidelines:

   1.  The higher part of allocated ASNs should be successive.

   2.  The higher part of remained ASNs should be as successive as
   possible (There might be holes due to historical reasons).

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   For example, if AS 0.333 allocates 4 ASNs to its customer, it should
   allocate ASNs from 65532.333 to 65535.333.

   Therefore, an ASN can only decide the number of ASNs in each
   allocation.  As examples, there might be two kind of polices:

   1.  Allocating a fixed ratio of all ASNs currently hold by the AS.

   2.  Allocating a fixed number of ASNs.

   For example, an AS who has ASNs from 0.100 to 65535.100 may choose to
   allocate 1/4 of its ASNs (49152.1s00~65535.100) or 256 ASNs
   (65280.100~65535.100).  An AS can define its own allocation policy
   provided the policy conforms to the above guidelines.

   According to the allocation strategy above, we encode the ASN's lower
   bits first.  Thus ASNs who have the same lower part share a common
   prefix.  As Figure 2 shows, AS 0.2473 and AS 3.2473 share the same
   prefix [xx]09:a900::/32 and their IPv6 blocks are more likely to be
   aggregated by ASN allocator AS 0.2473. (xx denote the bits provided
   by IANA).  Therefore, any prefixes that are more specific than the
   corresponding AS-Based prefix should not be advertised into global
   routing system.  As a result, IPv6 operator must filter the anomalous
   BGP updates which contain information of more specific prefixes.

4.  effects on the size of IPv6 inter-domain routing tables

   For core routers in the Internet, their inter-domain routing tables
   are usually large and complex. routing tables list the routes to
   particular network prefixes and some metrics associated with those
   routes.  As there are so many prefixes spreading around the current
   Internet, core routers' inter-domain routing tables become larger,
   causing routing system overloaded.

   In the current Internet, an AS usually announces several prefixes to
   its neighbors.  CABA scheme embeds 32-bit ASN into its IPv6 address.
   If CABA is adopted in the Internet, the number of spreading prefixes
   will reduce obviously.  One AS deploying CABA can only announce one
   prefix to other networks.  Thus, the size of inter-domain routing
   tables will never be more than the number of ASes.  Figure 3 shows
   the result of our simulation.  The routes from inter-domain routing
   tables are collected by Routeviews in August, 2016.  We choose
   different proportions of ASes in the Internet randomly to adopt CABA
   scheme and count the size of inter-domain routing tables.

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  +---------------+--------+--------+--------+--------+--------+-------+
  | adoption rate | 0      | 20     | 40     | 60     | 80     | 100   |
  +---------------+--------+--------+--------+--------+--------+-------+
  | RIB size      | 634050 | 515201 | 393595 | 280183 | 173500 | 53483 |
  +---------------+--------+--------+--------+--------+--------+-------+

    Figure 3: CABA deployment influences sizes of inter-domain routing
                                  tables

   In addition, since the allocation of ASNs facilitates aggregation of
   IP addresses (providers can aggregate classless AS-Based addresses
   which they allocate to customers), the size of routing tables will
   reduce further.

5.  IANA Considerations

   IANA should allocate a /8 IPv6 address block for this purpose, which
   is similar to 2002::/8 [RFC3068] used by 6to4.  No IPv4 allocation
   required.

6.  Security Considerations

   This document includes no request to security.

7.  Conclusions

   This draft describes an addressing scheme CABA (Classless AS-Based
   Addressing) and an address allocation scheme which can facilitate
   aggregation of addresses.  CABA can solve the scalability problem of
   IP address and reduce the size of core RIBs obviously.

8.  Normative References

   [RFC3068]  Huitema, C., "An Anycast Prefix for 6to4 Relay Routers",
              RFC 3068, DOI 10.17487/RFC3068, June 2001,
              <http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc3068>.

Authors' Addresses

   Xingang Shi (editor)
   Tsinghua Univ.
   Beijing
   CN

   Email: shixg@cernet.edu.cn

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   Yan Yang
   Tsinghua Univ.
   Beijing
   CN

   Email: yangyan15@mails.tsinghua.edu.cn

   Zhiliang Wang
   Tsinghua Univ.
   Beijing
   CN

   Email: wzl@csnet1.cs.tsinghua.edu.cn

   Jianping Wu
   Tsinghua Univ.
   Beijing
   CN

   Email: jianping@csnet1.cs.tsinghua.edu.cn

   Xia Yin
   Tsinghua Univ.
   Beijing
   CN

   Email: yxia@csnet1.cs.tsinghua.edu.cn

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