LISP Working Group J. N. Chiappa
Internet-Draft Yorktown Museum of Asian Art
Intended status: Informational October 1, 2013
Expires: April 4, 2014
An Architectural Introduction to the LISP
Location-Identity Separation System
draft-ietf-lisp-introduction-02
Abstract
LISP is an upgrade to the architecture of the IP internetworking
system, one which separates location and identity (previously
intermingled in IP addresses). This is a change which has been
identified by the IRTF as a critically necessary evolutionary
architectural step for the Internet. In LISP, nodes have both a
'locator' (a name which says _where_ in the network's connectivity
structure the node is) and an 'identifier' (a name which provides a
persistent handle for the node). A node may have more than one
locator, or its locator may change over time (e.g. if the node is
mobile), but it keeps the same identifier.
One of the chief novelties of LISP, compared to other proposals for
the separation of location and identity, is its approach to deploying
this upgrade. LISP aims to achieve the near-ubiquitous deployment
necessary for maximum exploitation of an architectural upgrade by i)
minimizing the amount of change needed (existing hosts and routers
can operate unmodified); and ii) by providing significant benefits to
early adopters.
This document is an introductory overview of the entire LISP system,
for those who are unfamiliar with it. The first half of the document
is a unified stand-alone brief introduction to LISP, for those who
only want a basic understanding of LISP; the document taken as a
whole provides a more detailed overview of LISP and its operation.
Status of This Memo
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Table of Contents
1. Prefatory Note . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
2. Background . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
3. Deployment Philosophy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
3.1. Economics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
3.2. Maximize Re-use of Existing Mechanism . . . . . . . . . . 8
3.3. 'Self-Deployment' . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
4. LISP Overview . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
4.1. Basic Approach . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
4.2. Basic Functionality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
4.3. Mapping from EIDs to RLOCs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
4.4. Interworking With Non-LISP-Capable Endpoints . . . . . . . 11
4.5. Security in LISP . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
5. Initial Applications . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
5.1. Provider Independence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
5.2. Multi-Homing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
5.3. Traffic Engineering . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
5.4. Routing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
5.5. Mobility . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
5.6. IP Version Reciprocal Traversal . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
5.7. Local Uses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
6. Major Functional Subsystems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
6.1. xTRs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
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6.1.1. Mapping Cache Performance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
6.2. The Mapping System . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
6.2.1. Mapping System Organization . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
6.2.2. Interface to the Mapping System . . . . . . . . . . . 20
6.2.3. Indexing Sub-system . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
7. Examples of Operation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
7.1. An Ordinary Packet's Processing . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
7.2. A Mapping Cache Miss . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24
8. Design Approach . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25
9. Data Plane - xTRs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25
9.1. When to Encapsulate . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25
9.2. UDP Encapsulation Details . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26
9.3. Header Control Channel . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27
9.3.1. Mapping Versioning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27
9.3.2. Echo Nonces . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27
9.3.3. Instances . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28
9.4. Probing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28
9.5. Mapping Lifetimes and Timeouts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29
9.6. Security of Mapping Lookups . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29
9.7. Mapping Gleaning in ETRs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30
9.8. Fragmentation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30
10. Control Plane - The Mapping System . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30
10.1. The Mapping System Interface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31
10.1.1. Map-Request Messages . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31
10.1.2. Map-Reply Messages . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32
10.1.3. Map-Register and Map-Notify Messages . . . . . . . . . 32
10.2. The DDT Indexing Sub-system . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33
10.2.1. Map-Referral Messages . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34
10.3. Reliability via Replication . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34
10.4. Security of the DDT Indexing Sub-system . . . . . . . . . 34
10.5. Extended Tools . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35
10.6. Performance of the Mapping System . . . . . . . . . . . . 35
11. Multicast Support in LISP . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36
11.1. Basic Concepts of Multicast Support in LISP . . . . . . . 36
11.2. Initial Multicast Support in LISP . . . . . . . . . . . . 37
12. Deployment Issues and Mechanisms . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38
12.1. LISP Deployment Needs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38
12.2. Interworking Mechanism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38
12.2.1. Proxy Devices . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39
12.2.2. LISP-NAT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40
12.3. Use Through NAT Devices . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41
12.4. LISP and DFZ Routing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41
12.4.1. Long-term Possibilities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42
13. Fault Discovery/Handling . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42
13.1. Handling Missing Mappings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42
13.2. Outdated Mappings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43
13.2.1. Outdated Mappings - Updated Mapping . . . . . . . . . 43
13.2.2. Outdated Mappings - Wrong ETR . . . . . . . . . . . . 43
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13.2.3. Outdated Mappings - No Longer an ETR . . . . . . . . . 43
13.3. Erroneous Mappings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44
13.4. Neighbour ETR Liveness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44
13.5. Neighbour ETR Reachability . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44
14. Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45
15. IANA Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45
16. Security Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46
17. References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46
17.1. Normative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46
17.2. Informative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47
Appendix A. Glossary/Definition of Terms . . . . . . . . . . . . 51
Appendix B. Other Appendices . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53
B.1. A Brief History of Location/Identity Separation . . . . . 53
B.2. A Brief History of the LISP Project . . . . . . . . . . . 54
B.3. Old LISP 'Models' . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55
B.4. The ALT Mapping Indexing Sub-system . . . . . . . . . . . 55
B.5. Early NAT Support . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56
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1. Prefatory Note
This document is the first of a pair which, together, form what one
would think of as the 'architecture document' for LISP (the
'Location-Identity Separation Protocol'). Much of what would
normally be in an architecture document (e.g. the architectural
design principles used in LISP, and the design considerations behind
various components and aspects of the LISP system) is in the second
document, the 'Architectural Perspective on LISP' document.
This 'Architectural Introduction' document is primarily intended for
those who unfamiliar with LISP, and want to start learning about it.
It is intended to both be easy to follow, and also to give the reader
a choice as to how much they wish to know about LISP. Reading only
the first part(s) of the document will give a good high-level view of
the system; reading the complete document should provide a fairly
detailed understanding of the entire system.
This goal explains why the document has a somewhat unusual structure.
It is not a typical reference document, where all the content on a
particular topic is grouped in one place. (That role is filled by
the various protocol specifications.) Instead, it is structured as a
series of phases, each covering the entire system, but with
increasing detail.
It starts with a very high-level view of the entire system, to
provide readers with a mental framework to help understand the more
detailed material which follows. A second pass over the whole system
then goes into more detail. Finally, individual sub-systems are
covered in still deeper detail.
The intent is two-fold: first, the multiple passes over the entire
system, each one going into more detail, are intended to ease
understanding; second, people can simply stop reading when they have
a detailed-enough understanding for their purposes.
People who just want to get an idea of how LISP works might only read
the first two parts; they can stop reading either just before, or
just after, Section 7, "Examples of Operation". People who are going
to go on and read all the protocol specifications (perhaps to
implement LISP) would need/want to read the entire document.
Note: This document is a descriptive document, not a protocol
specification. Should it differ in any detail from any of the LISP
protocol specification documents, they take precedence for the actual
operation of the protocol.
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2. Background
It has gradually been realized in the networking community that
networks, especially large networks, should deal quite separately
with the 'identity' and 'location' of an 'endpoint' ([Chiappa]) -
basically, 'who' an endpoint is, and 'where' it is. (A more detailed
history of this evolution is in Appendix B.1, "A Brief History of
Location/Identity Separation".)
At the moment, in both IPv4 and IPv6, IP addresses indicate both
where the named node is, as well as identify it for purposes of end-
end communication. (The term 'node' is admittedly a nebulous one,
but it was deliberately chosen for use in this document precisely
because its definition is not fixed, and therefore unlikely to cause
erroneous images in the minds of readers. You will not go far wrong
if you think of a node as being something like a host.)
However, the separation of location and identity is a step which has
recently been identified by the IRTF as a critically necessary
evolutionary architectural step for the Internet. [RFC6115]
The on-going LISP project is an attempt to provide a viable path
towards this separation. (A brief history of the LISP project can be
found in Appendix B.2, "A Brief History of the LISP Project".) As an
add-on to a large existing system, it has had to make certain
compromises. (For a good example, see [Perspective], Section
"Residual Location Functionality in EIDs".) However, if it reaches
near-ubiquitous deployment, it will have two important consequences.
First, in effectively providing separation of location and identity,
along with a distributed directory of the bindings between them,
'Wheeler's Law' ("All problems in computer science can be solved by
another level of indirection") will come into play, and the Internet
technical community will have a new, immensely powerful, tool at its
disposal. The fact that the namespaces on both sides of the mapping
are global ones maximizes the power of that tool. (See
[Perspective], Section "Need for a Mapping System", for more on
this.)
Second, because of combination of flexible capability built into
LISP, and the breaking of the unification of location and identity
names, further architectural evolvement of the Internet becomes
easily available; for example, new namespaces for location could be
designed and deployed. (See [Future] for more on this.)
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3. Deployment Philosophy
It may seem odd to cover 'deployment philosophy' at this point in
such a document. However the deployment philosophy was a major
driver for much of the design (to some degree the architecture, and
to a very large measure, the engineering). So, as such an important
motivator, it is very desirable for readers to have this material in
hand as they examine the design, so that design choices that may seem
questionable at first glance can be better understood.
Experience over the last several decades has shown that having a
viable 'deployment model' for a new design is absolutely key to the
success of that design. In general, it is comparatively easy to
conceive of new network designs, but much harder to devise approaches
which will actually get deployed throughout the global network. A
new design may be fantastic - but if it can not or will not be
successfully deployed (for whatever factors), it is useless.
This absolute primacy of a viable deployment model is what has lead
to some painful compromises in the design; and the extreme focus on a
viable deployment model (including economics) is one of the novelties
of LISP.
3.1. Economics
The key factor in successful adoption, as shown by recent experience
in the Internet - and little appreciated to begin with, some decades
back - is economics: does the new design have benefits which outweigh
its costs.
More importantly, this balance needs to hold for early adopters -
because if they do not receive benefits to their adoption, the sphere
of earliest adopters will not expand, and it will never get to
widespread deployment. One might have the world's best 'clean-slate'
design, but if it does not have a deployment plan which is
economically feasible, it's not good for much.
This is particularly true of architectural enhancements, which are
far less likely to be an addition which one can 'bolt onto the side'
of existing mechanisms, and often offer their greatest benefits only
when widely (or ubiquitously) deployed.
Maximizing the cost-benefit ratio obviously has two aspects. First,
on the cost side, by making the design as inexpensive as possible,
which means in part making the deployment as easy as possible.
Second, on the benefit side, by providing many new capabilities,
which is best done not by loading the design up with lots of features
or options (which adds complexity), but by making the addition
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powerful through deeper flexibility. We believe LISP has met both of
these goals.
3.2. Maximize Re-use of Existing Mechanism
One key part of reducing the cost of a new design is to absolutely
minimize the amount of change _required_ to existing, deployed,
devices: the fewer devices need to be changed, and the smaller the
change to those that do, the lower the pain (and thus the greater the
likelihood) of deployment.
Designs which absolutely require 'forklift upgrades' to large amounts
of existing gear are far less likely to succeed - because they have
to have extremely large benefits to make their very substantial costs
worthwhile.
It is for this reason that LISP, in most cases, initially requires no
changes to almost all existing devices in the Internet (both hosts
and routers); LISP functionality needs to be added in only a few
places (see Section 12.1, "LISP Deployment Needs", for more).
LISP also initially reuses, where-ever possible, existing protocols
(IPv4 [RFC791] and IPv6 [RFC2460]). The 'initially' must be stressed
- careful attention has also long been paid to the long-term future
(see [Future]), and larger changes become feasible as deployment
increases.
3.3. 'Self-Deployment'
LISP has deliberately employed a rather different deployment model,
which we might call 'self-deployment' (for want of a better term); it
does not require a huge push to get it deployed, rather, it is hoped
that once people see it and realize they can easily make good use of
it _on their own_ (i.e. without requiring adoption by others), it
will 'deploy itself' (hence the name of the approach).
One can liken the problem of deploying new systems in this way to
rolling a snowball down a hill: unless one starts with a big enough
snowball, and finds a hill of the right steepness (i.e. the right
path for it to travel), one's snowball is not going to go anywhere on
its own. However, if one has picked one's spot correctly, once
started, little additional work is needed.
4. LISP Overview
LISP is an incrementally deployable architectural upgrade to the
existing Internet infrastructure, one which provides separation of
location and identity. It starts to separate the names used for
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identity and location of nodes, which are currently unified in IPvN
addresses. (This document uses the meaning for 'address' proposed in
[Atkinson], i.e. a name with mixed location and identity semantics.)
The separation into names with purely location and identity semantics
is usually - but not necessarily - not perfect, for reasons which are
driven by the deployment philosophy (above), and explored in more
detail elsewhere (in [Perspective], Section "Namespaces-EIDs-
Residual").
4.1. Basic Approach
In LISP, nodes have both an 'identifier' (a name which serves only to
provide a persistent handle for the node), called an 'EID' (short for
'endpoint identifier'), and an associated 'locator' (a name which
says _where_ in the network's connectivity structure the node is),
called an 'RLOC' (short for 'routing locator').
A node may be associated with more than one RLOC, or the RLOC may
change over time (e.g. if the node is mobile), but it would normally
always have the same EID.
Ideally, one should think of the EID as naming the node - or rather,
its end-end communication entity (see [Chiappa] for more), if one
wants to be as forward-looking as possible. RLOC(s) name
interface(s) - usually on the xTRs, at this stage.
This second distinction, of _what_ is named by the two classes of
name, is a further important enhancement to the architecture; failing
to clearly recognize interfaces, and end-end communication entities,
as distinctly separate classes of objects is another failing of the
existing Internet architecture (again, one inherited from the
previous generation of networking).
The distinction is also is necessary both to enable some of the
capabilities that LISP provides (e.g the ability to seamlessly
support multiple interfaces, to different networks).
An important insight in LISP is that it initially uses existing IPvN
addresses for both of these kinds of names, as opposed to some
similar earlier proposals (e.g. [RFC1992]), which proposed using a
new namespace for locators. This choice minimized LISP's deployment
cost, as well as providing the ability to easily interact with un-
modified hosts and routers.
The capability to use other namespaces for both kinds of names is
already built in, which is expected to greatly increase the long-term
benefits, flexibility, and power of the LISP mapping layer.
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4.2. Basic Functionality
The basic operation of LISP, as it currently stands, is quite simple.
LISP augmented packet switches near the source and destination of
packets intercept traffic, and 'enhance' the packets for the trip
between the LISP switches.
The overall processing is shown below, in Figure 1:
(to be added)
Figure 1: Basic LISP Packet Flow
The LISP device near the original source (the Ingress Tunnel Router,
or 'ITR') looks up additional information about the destination, and
then wraps the packet in an outer header, one which contains some of
that additional information. The LISP device near the destination,
the (the Egress Tunnel Router, or 'ETR') removes that header, leaving
the original, un-modified, packet to be sent on to the destination
node.
To retrieve that additional information, the ITR uses the information
in the original packet about the identity of its ultimate
destination, i.e. the destination address; in LISP, this is the EID
of the ultimate destination. It uses the destination EID to look up
the current location (the RLOC) of that EID.
The lookup is performed through a 'mapping system', which is the
heart of LISP: it is a distributed directory of mappings from EIDs to
RLOCs. The destination RLOC(s) will normally be the address(es) of
the ETR(s) near the ultimate destination.
The ITR then generates a new outer header for the original packet,
with that header containing the ETR's RLOC as the wrapped packet's
destination, and the ITR's own address (i.e. the RLOC associated with
the original source) as the wrapped packet's source, and sends it
off.
When the packet gets to the ETR, that outer header is stripped off,
and the original packet is forwarded to the original ultimate
destination for normal processing.
Return traffic is handled similarly, often (depending on the
network's configuration) with the original ITR and ETR switching
roles. The ETR and ITR functionality is usually co-located in a
single device; these are normally denominated as 'xTRs'.
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4.3. Mapping from EIDs to RLOCs
The mappings from EIDs to RLOCs are provided by a distributed, and
potentially replicated, database, the 'mapping database', which is
the heart of LISP. Entities which need mappings get them from the
'mapping system', which is a collection of subsystems through which
clients can find and obtain mappings. (The mapping system will be
discussed in more detail below, in Section 6.2, "The Mapping System"
and Section 10, "Control Plane - The Mapping System".)
Mappings are requested on demand, and generally not pre-loaded; in
other words, mappings are normally distributed via a 'pull'
mechanism. Once obtained by an ITR, they are cached by the ITR, for
performance reasons.
Extensive studies, including large-scale simulations driven by
lengthy recordings of actual traffic at several major sites, have
been performed to verify that this 'pull and cache' approach is
viable, in practical engineering terms. (This subject will be
discussed in more detail in Section 6.1.1, "Mapping Cache
Performance", below.)
4.4. Interworking With Non-LISP-Capable Endpoints
It is clearly crucial to provide the capability for 'easy'
interoperation between hosts 'using' LISP (i.e. they are behind xTRs,
and their EIDs are in the mapping database), and existing non-LISP-
using hosts (often called 'legacy' hosts) or sites (where 'site' is
usually taken to mean a collection of hosts, routers and networks
under a single administrative control).
To allow such interoperation, a number of mechanisms have been
designed. This multiplicity is in part because different mechanisms
have different advantages and disadvantages (so that no single
mechanism is optimal for all cases); this also allows a choice to be
made when more field experience has been obtained.
One approach uses proxy LISP devices, called PITRs (proxy ITRs) and
PETRs (proxy ETRs), to provide LISP functionality during interaction
with legacy hosts. Another approach uses a device with combined LISP
and NAT ([RFC1631]) functionality, named a LISP-NAT. (See
Section 12.2.1, "Proxy Devices", and Section 12.2.2, "LISP-NAT",
respectively, for details of each.)
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4.5. Security in LISP
LISP has a subtle security philosophy; see [Perspective], Section
"Security", where it is laid out in some detail.
To provide a brief overview, it is definitely understood that LISP
needs to be highly _securable_, especially in the long term; over
time, the attacks mounted by 'bad guys' are becoming more and more
sophisticated. So LISP, like DNS, needs to be _capable_ of providing
'the very best' security there is.
At the same time, there is a conflicting goal: it must be deployable
(i.e. have a viable cost). That means two things: First, with the
limited manpower currently available, we cannot expect to create the
complete security apparatus that we might see in the long term (which
requires not just design, but also implementation, etc). Second,
security needs to be flexible, so that we don't overload the users
with more security than they need at any point.
To accomplish these divergent goals, the approach taken is to
thorougly analyze what LISP needs for security, and then design, in
detail, a scheme for providing that security. Then, steps can be
taken to ensure that the appropriate 'hooks' (such as packet fields)
are included at an early stage, when doing so is still easy. Later
on, the design can be fully specified, implemented, and deployed.
LISP does already include a number of security mechanisms; in
particular, requesting mappings can be secured (see Section 9.6,
"Security of Mapping Lookups"), as can registering of xTRs (see
Section 10.1.3, "Map-Register and Map-Notify Messages"); the key
indexing database of the mapping system is also secured (see
Section 10.4, "Security of the DDT Indexing Sub-system").
The existing security mechanisms, and their configuration (which is
mostly manual at this point) currently in LISP are felt to be
adequate for the needs of the on-going early stages of deployment;
experience will indicate when improvements are required (within the
constraints of the conflicting goal given above).
5. Initial Applications
As previously mentioned, it is felt that LISP will provide even the
earliest adopters with some useful capabilities, and that these
capabilities will drive early LISP deployment.
It is very imporant to note that even when used only for
interoperation with existing unmodified hosts, use of LISP can still
provide benefits for communications with the site which has deployed
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it - and, perhaps even more importantly, can do so _to both sides_.
This characteristic acts to further enhance the utility for early
adopters of deploying LISP, thereby increasing the cost/benefit ratio
needed to drive deployment, and increasing the 'self-deployment'
aspect of LISP.
Note also that this section only lists likely _early_ applications
and benefits - if and once deployment becomes more widespread, other
aspects will come into play (as described in [Perspective], in the
Section "Goals of LISP").
5.1. Provider Independence
Provider independence (i.e. the ability to easily change one's
Internet Service Provider) was probably the first place where the
Internet engineering community finally really felt the utility of
separating location and identity.
The problem is simple: for the global routing to scale, addresses
need to be aggregated (i.e. things which are close in the overall
network's connectivity need to have closely related addresses), the
so-called "provider aggregatable" addresses. [RFC4116] However, if
this principle is followed, it means that when an entity switches
providers (i.e. it moves to a different 'place' in the network), it
has to renumber, a painful undertaking. [RFC5887]
In theory, it ought to be sufficient to update the DNS entries, and
have everyone switch to the new addresses, but in practise, addresses
are embedded in many places, such as firewall configurations at other
sites.
Having separate namespaces for location and identity greatly reduces
the problems involved with renumbering; an organization which moves
retains its EIDs (which are how most other parties refer to its
nodes), but is allocated new RLOCs, and the mapping system can
quickly provide the updated mapping from the EIDs to the new RLOCs.
5.2. Multi-Homing
Multi-homing is another place where the value of separation of
location and identity became apparent. There are several different
sub-flavours of the multi-homing problem - e.g. depending on whether
one wants open connections to keep working, etc - and other axes as
well (e.g. site multi-homing versus host multi-homing).
In particular, for the 'keep open connections up' case, without
separation of location and identity, the only currently feasible
approach is to use provider-independent addressses - which moves the
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problem into the global routing system, with attendant costs. This
approach is also not really feasible for host multi-homing.
Multi-homing was once somewhat esoteric, but a number of trends are
driving an increased desirability, e.g. the wish to have multiple ISP
links to a site for robustness; the desire to have mobile handsets
connect up to multiple wireless systems; etc.
Again, separation of location and identity, and the existince of a
mapping layer which can be updated fairly quickly, as provided by
LISP, is a very useful tool for all variants of this issue.
5.3. Traffic Engineering
Traffic engineering (TE) [RFC3272], desirable though this capability
is in a global network, is currently somewhat problematic to provide
in the Internet. The problem, fundamentally, is that this capability
was not forseen when the Internet was designed, so the support for it
via 'hacks' is neither clean, nor flexible.
TE is, fundamentally, a routing issue. However, the current Internet
routing architecture, which is basically the Baran design of fifty
years ago [Baran] (a single large, distributed computation), is ill-
suited to provide TE. The Internet seems a long way from adopting a
more-advanced routing architecture, although the basic concepts for
such have been known for some time. [RFC1992]
Although the identity-location mapping layer is thus a poor place,
architecturally, to provide TE capabilities, it is still an
improvement over the current routing tools available for this purpose
(e.g. injection of more-specific routes into the global routing
table).
In addition, instead of the entire network incurring the costs
(through the routing system overhead), when using a mapping layer to
provide TE, the overhead is limited to those who are actually
communicating with that particular destination.
LISP includes a number of features in the mapping system to support
TE. (described in Section 6.2, "The Mapping System", below); more
details about using LISP for TE can be found in [LISP-TE].
Also, a number of academic papers have explored how LISP can be used
to do TE, and how effective it can be. See the online LISP
Bibliography ([Bibliography]) for information about them.
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5.4. Routing
Multi-homing and Traffic Engineering are both, in some sense, uses of
LISP for routing, but there are many other routing-related uses for
LISP.
One of the major original motivations for the separation of location
and identity in general, and thus LISP, was to reduce the growth of
the routing tables in the so-called 'Default-Free-Zone' (DFZ) - the
core of the Internet, the part where routes to _all_ ultimate
destinations must be available. LISP is expected to help with this;
for more detail, see Section 12.4, "LISP and DFZ Routing", below.
LISP may also have more local applications in which it can help with
routing; see, for instance, [CorasBGP].
5.5. Mobility
Mobility is yet another place where separation of location and
identity is obviously a key part of a clean, efficient and high-
functionality solution. Considerable experimentation has been
completed on doing mobility with LISP.
The mobility provided by LISP allows active sessions to survive moves
(provided of course that there is not a period of inaccessability
which exceeds a timeout). LISP mobility also will typically have
better packet 'stretch' (i.e. increase in path length) compared to
traditional mobility schemes, which use a 'home agent'.
5.6. IP Version Reciprocal Traversal
Note that LISP inherently supports intermixing of various IP versions
for packet carriage; IPv4 packets might well be carried in IPv6, or
vice versa, depending on the network's configuration.
This capability allows an 'island' of operation of one type to be
'automatically' tunneled over a stretch of infrastucture which only
supports the other type.
While the machinery of LISP may seem too heavy-weight to be good for
such a mundane use, this is not intended as a 'sole use' case for
deployment of LISP. Rather, it is something which, if LISP is being
deployed anyway (for its other advantages), is an added benefit that
one gets 'for free'.
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5.7. Local Uses
LISP has a number of use cases which are within purely local
contexts, i.e. not in the larger Internet. These fall into two
categories: uses seen on the Internet (above), but here on a private
(and usually small scale) setting; and applications which do not have
a direct analog in the larger Internet, and which apply only to local
deployments.
Among the former are multi-homing, IP version traversal, and support
of VPN's for segmentation and multi-tenancy (i.e. a spatially
separated private VPN whose components are joined together using the
public Internet as a backbone).
Among the latter class, non-Internet applications which have no
analog on the Internet, are the following example applications:
virtual machine mobility in data centers; other non-IP EID types such
as local network MAC addresses, or application specific data.
Several of the applications listed in this section are the ones which
have been most popular for LISP in practise; these include virtual
networks, and virtual machine mobility.
These often show a synergistic tendency, in that a site which
installs LISP to do one, often finds that then becomes a small matter
to use it for the second. Given all the things which LISP can do, it
is hoped that this synergistic effect will continue to expand LISP's
uses.
6. Major Functional Subsystems
LISP has only two major functional sub-systems - the collection of
LISP packet switches (the xTRs), which form the 'data plane' of LISP;
and the mapping system, the most important part of the 'control
plane', which manages the mapping database.
The purpose and operation of each is described at a high level below,
and then, later on, in a fair amount of detail, in separate sections
on each (Sections Section 9, "Data Plane - xTRs", and Section 10,
"Control Plane - The Mapping System", respectively).
6.1. xTRs
xTRs are IPvN packet switches which have been augmented with extra
functionality in both the data and control planes, to perform LISP
data and control functionality (respectively).
The data plane functions in ITRs include deciding which packets need
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to be given LISP processing (since packets to non-LISP hosts may be
sent as they are); i.e. looking up the mapping; encapsulating
(wrapping) the packet; and sending it to the ETR. To the extent that
traffic engineering features are in use for a particular EID, the
ITRs implement them as well.
This encapsulation is done using UDP [RFC768] (for reasons to be
explained below, in Section 9.2, "UDP Encapsulation Details"), along
with an additional outer IPvN header (to hold the source and
destination RLOCs).
In the ETR, the data plane simply decapsulates (unwraps) the packets,
and forwards the now-normal packets to the ultimate destination.
Control plane functions in ITRs include: asking for {EID->RLOC}
mappings via request control messages (Map-Request packets); handling
the returning reply control messages (Map-Reply packets), which
contain the requested information; managing the local cache of
mappings; checking for the reachability and liveness of their
neighbour ETRs; and checking for outdated mappings and requesting
updates.
In the ETR, control plane functions include participating in the
neighbour reachability and liveness function (see Section 13.4,
"Neighbour ETR Liveness"); interacting with the mapping sub-system to
let it know what mapping this ETR can provide (see Section 6.2.2,
"Interface to the Mapping System"); and answering requests from ITRs
for those mappings (ditto).
6.1.1. Mapping Cache Performance
As mentioned, studies have been performed to verify that caching
mappings in ITRs is viable, in practical engineering terms. These
studies not only verified that such caching is feasible, but also
provided some insight for designing ITR mapping caches.
Obviously, these studies are all snapshots of a particular point in
time, and as the Internet continues its life-cycle they will
increasingly become out-dated. However, they are useful because they
provide an insight into how well LISP can be expected to perform, and
scale, over time.
Full details of the results are too lengthy to include here; see
[Perspective], Section "Mapping Cache Performance" for more.
Briefly, however, the first, [Iannone], was performed in the very
early stages of the LISP effort, to verify that that caching approach
was feasible.
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Packet traces of all traffic over the external connection of a large
university over a week-long period were collected; simulations driven
by these recording were then performed. A variety of control
settings on the cache were used, to study the effects of varying the
settings.
First, the simulation gave the cache sizes that would result from
such a cache design: it showed that the resulting cache sizes ranged
from 7,500 entries, up to about 100,000 (depending on factors such as
traffic and entry retention time). Using some estimations as to how
much memory mapping entries would use, this indicated cache sizes of
between roughly 100 Kbytes and a few Mbytes.
Of more interest, in a way, were the results regarding two important
measurements of the effectiveness of the cache: i) the hit ratio
(i.e. the share of references which could be satisified by the
cache), and ii) the miss _rate_ (since control traffic overhead is
one of the chief concerns when using a cache). These results were
also encouraging: miss (and hence lookup) rates ranged from 30 per
minute, up to 3,000 per minute.
Significantly, this was substantially lower than the amount of
observed DNS traffic, which ranged from 1,800 packets per minute up
to 15,000 per minute. The results overall showed that using a
demand-loaded cache was an entirely plausible design approach: both
cache size, and the control plane traffic load, were definitely
feasible.
The second, [Kim], was in general terms similar, except that it used
data from a large ISP, one with about three times as many users as
the previous study. It used the same cache design philosophy (the
cache size was not fixed), but slightly different, lower, retention
time values.
The results were similar: cache sizes ranges from 20,000 entries to
roughly 60,000; the miss rate ranged from very roughly 400 per minute
to very roughly 7,000 per minute, similar to the previous results.
Finally, a third study, [CorasCache], examined the effect of using a
fixed size cache, and a purely Least Recently Used (LRU) cache
eviction algorithm (i.e. no timeouts). It also tried to verify that
models of the performance of such a cache (using previous theoretical
work on caches) produced results that conformed with actual empirical
measurements.
It used yet another set of packet traces; using a cache size of
around 50,000 entries produced a miss rate of around 1x10-4; again,
definitely viable, and in line with the results of the other studies.
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6.2. The Mapping System
The mapping system's entire purpose is to give ITRs on-demand access
to the mapping database, which is a distributed, and potentially
replicated, database which holds mappings between EIDs (identity) and
RLOCs (location), along with needed ancillary data (e.g. lifetimes).
To be exact, it contains mappings between EID blocks and RLOCs (the
block size is given explicitly, as part of the syntax). Support for
blocks is both for minimizing the administrative configuration
overhead, as well as for operational efficiency; e.g. when a group of
EIDs are behind a single xTR.
However, the block may be, and often is, as small as a single EID.
However, since mappings are only loaded upon demand, if smaller
blocks become predominant, then the increased size of the overall
database is far less problematic than if the Internet's routing
tables came to be dominated by such small entries.
A particular EID (or EID block) may have more than one RLOC, or may
change its RLOC(s), while keeping its basic identity.
Also, in general, throughout LISP, anyplace a name (EID, RLOC, etc)
appears in a control packet, the packet format also includes an
Address Family Identifier (AFI) for that name. [AFI] The inclusion
of the AFI allows LISP (and in particular, the mapping system
interface, as embodied in those control packets) a great deal of
flexibility. (See [Perspective], Section "Namespaces" for more on
this.)
RLOC(s) may be compound names; see [Improvements], Section "LISP
Canonical Address Format (LCAF)" for more.
Finally, the mapping from an EID (or EID block) contains not just the
RLOC(s), but also (for each RLOC for any given EID entry) priority
and weight fields (to allow allocation of load between several RLOCs
at a given priority); this allows a certain amount of traffic
engineering to be accomplished with LISP.
6.2.1. Mapping System Organization
The mapping system is actually split into what are effectively three
major functional sub-systems (although the latter two are closely
integrated, and appear to most entities in the LISP system as a
single sub-system).
The first covers the actual mappings themselves; they are held by the
ETRs, and an ITR which needs a mapping gets it (effectively) directly
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from the ETR. This co-location of the authoritative version of the
mappings, and the forwarding functionality which it describes, is an
instance of fate-sharing. [Clark]
To find the appropriate ETR(s) to query for the mapping, the second
two sub-systems form an 'indexing system', itself also a distributed,
potentially replicated database. It provides information on which
ETR(s) are authoritative sources for the various {EID -> RLOC}
mappings which are available. The two sub-systems which form it are
the client interface sub-system, and indexing sub-system (which holds
and provides the actual information).
6.2.2. Interface to the Mapping System
The client interface to the indexing system from an ITR's point of
view is not with the indexing sub-system directly; rather, it is
through the client-interface sub-system, which is provied by devices
called Map-Resolvers (MRs).
ITRs send request control messages (Map-Request packets) to an MR.
(This interface is probably the most important standardized interface
in LISP - it is the key to the entire system.) The MR then uses the
indexing sub-system to allow it to forward the Map-Request to an
appropriate MS, which in turn sends the Map-Request on to the
appropriate ETR. The latter is authoritative for the actual contents
of all mappings for those EID namespace blocks which have been
delegated to it.
The ETR then formulates reply control messages (Map-Reply packets),
which are sent to the ITR. The details of the indexing sub-system
are thus hidden from the ITRs.
(Note that in some cases, it is desirable for the MS to reply on
behalf of the ETR, in so-called 'proxy' mode. This behaviour can be
selected when the ETR registers with the MR, described immediately
below.)
Similarly, the client interface to the indexing system from an ETR's
point of view is through devices called Map-Servers (MSs - perhaps a
poorly chosen term, since their primary function is not to send
responses to queries from clients of the mapping system).
ETRs send registration control messages (Map-Register packets) to an
MS, which makes the information about the mappings which the ETR
indicates it is authoritative for available to the indexing sub-
system.
The MS formulates a reply control message (the Map-Notify packet),
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which confirms the registration, and is returned to the ETR. The
details of the indexing sub-system are thus likewise hidden from the
'ordinary' ETRs.
The fact that the details of the indexing sub-system are entirely
hidden from xTRs gives considerably flexibility to this aspect of
LISP. As long as any potential indexing sub-system can track where
mappings are, it could potentially be used; this would allow the
actual indexing sub-system to be replaced without needing to modify
the clients - as has happened once already (see below).
6.2.3. Indexing Sub-system
The current indexing sub-system is the Delegated Database Tree (DDT),
which is very similar to DNS ([DDT], [RFC1034]), although unlike DNS,
DDT was designed from the start to be secured. Also unlike DNS, the
actual mappings are not handled by DDT; DDT, as the indexing sub-
system, merely identifies the ETRs which hold the actual mappings.
DDT replaced an earlier indexing sub-system, ALT (Appendix B.4, "The
ALT Mapping Indexing Sub-system"); this swap validated the concept of
having a client-interface sub-system between the indexing sub-system,
and the clients.
6.2.3.1. DDT Overview
Conceptually, DDT is fairly simple: like DNS, in DDT the delegation
of the EID namespace ([Perspective], Section "Namespaces-XEIDs") is
instantiated as a tree of DDT 'nodes', starting with the 'root' DDT
node. Each node is responsible (authoritative?) for one or more
blocks of the EID namespace.
The 'root' node is reponsible for the entire namespace; any DDT node
can 'delegate' part(s) of its block(s) of the namespace to child DDT
node(s). The child node(s) can in turn further delegate (necessarily
smaller) blocks of namespace to their children, through as many
levels as are needed (for operational, administrative, etc, needs).
Just as with DNS, for reasons of performance, reliability and
robustness, any particular node in the DDT delegation tree may be
instantiated in more than one redundant physical server machines.
Obviously, all the servers which instantiate a particular node in the
tree have to have identical data about that node; if they do not,
when a Map-Request is sent to one that does not have consistent
information with its other sibling(s), incorrect results will be
returned.
Also, although the delegation hierarchy is a strict tree , a single
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DDT server could be responsible (authoritative?) for more than one
block of the EID namespace.
Eventually, leaf nodes in the DDT tree statically delegate EID
namespace blocks to MS's, which are DDT terminal nodes; i.e. a leaf
of the tree is reached when the delegation points to an MS instead of
to another DDT node.
The MS is in direct communication with the ETR(s) which both i) are
authoritative for the mappings for that block, and ii) handle traffic
to that block of EID namespace.
6.2.3.2. Use of DDT by MRs
An MR which wants to find a mapping for a particular EID first
interacts with the nodes of the DDT tree, discovering (by querying
DDT nodes) the chain of delegations which cover that EID. Eventually
it is directed to an MS, and then to an ETR which is responsible
{{authoritative?}} for that EID.
Also, again like DNS, MRs cache information about the delegations in
the DDT tree. This means that once an MR has been in operation for
while, it will usually have much of the delegation information cached
locally (especially the top levels of the delegation tree). This
allows them, when passed a request for a mapping by an ITR, to
usually forward the mapping request to the appropriate MS without
having to do a complete tree-walk of the DDT tree to find any
particular mappping.
Thus, a typical resolution cycle would usually involve looking at
some locally cached delegation information, perhaps loading some
missing delegation entries into their delegation cache, and finally
sending the Map-Request to the appropriate MS.
The big advantage of DDT over the ALT, in performance terms, is that
it allows MRs to interact _directly_ with distant DDT nodes (as
opposed to the ALT, which _always_ required mediation through
intermediate nodes); caching of information about those distant nodes
allows DDT to make extremely effective use of this capability.
It should also be noted that the delegation tree is fairly static,
since it reflects namespace allocations, which are themselves fairly
static. This stability has several important consequences. First,
it increases the performance of the mapping system, since
intermediate nodes almost never need to be re-queried. Second, it is
not necessary to include a mechanism to find outdated delegations.
The _mappings_, however, may change at a high rate, and the system is
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designed to make sure that such changes are acted upon. This allows
LISP to provide a number of capabilities, such as mobility.
7. Examples of Operation
To aid in comprehension, a few examples are given of user packets
traversing the LISP system. The first shows the processing of a
typical user packet, i.e. what the vast majority of user packets will
see. The second shows what happens when the first packet to a
previously-unseen ultimate destination (at a particular ITR) is to be
processed by LISP.
7.1. An Ordinary Packet's Processing
This case follows the processing of a typical user packet (for
instance, a normal TCP data or acknowledgment packet associated with
an already-open TCP connection) - i.e. not the first packet sent from
a given source to a given destination - as it makes its way from the
original source host to the ultimate destination.
When the packet has made its way through the local site to an ITR
(which in this case is a border router for the site), the border
router looks up the destination address (an EID) in its local mapping
cache. For EIDs which are IPvN addresses, this lookup uses the usual
IPvN 'longest prefix match' algorithm.
It finds a mapping, which instructs it to wrap the packet in an outer
header (an IP packet, containing a UDP packet which contains a LISP
header, and then the user's original packet (see Section 9.2, "UDP
Encapsulation Details", for the reasons for this particular choice).
The destination address in the outer header is set by the ITR to the
RLOC of the destination ETR.
The packet is then sent off through the Internet, using normal
Internet routing tables, etc.
On arrival at the destination ETR, the ETR will notice that it is
listed as the destination in the outer header. It will examine the
packet, detect that it is a LISP packet, and unwrap it. It will then
examine the header of the user's original packet, and forward it
internally, through the local site, to the ultimate destination.
At the ultimate destination, the packet will be processed, and may
produce a return packet, which follows the exact same process in
reverse - with the exception that the roles of the ITR and ETR are
swapped.
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7.2. A Mapping Cache Miss
If a host sends a packet, and it gets to the ITR, and the ITR both i)
determines that it needs to perform LISP processing on the user data
packet, but ii) does not yet have a mapping cache entry which covers
that destination EID, then additional processing ensues; it has to
look up the mapping in the mapping system (as previously described in
Section 4.2, "Basic Functionality").
The overall processing is shown below, in Figure 2:
Mapping System
----- -----
| | 4 | |
Map Resolver | | -------> | | Map Server
| | | |
----- -----
^ |
Key: | |
| |
-- = Control | |
== = Data | |
2 | 6 | 5
| --- |
Host A | / \ | Host B
| |_ \ V
----- ----- \ ----- -----
| | 1 | | 7 | | 8 | |
| | =====> | ITR | =======> | ETR | =====> | |
| | | | | | | |
----- ----- ----- -----
Figure 2: Packet Flow With Missing Mapping
1. Source-EID sends packet (to Dest-EID) to ITR
2. ITR sends Map-Request to Map Resolver
3. (Not shown) Map-Resolver locates corrrect Map-Server for Dest-EID
4. Map-Resolver delivers Map-Request to Map-Server
5. Map-Server delivers Map-Request to ETR
6. ETR returns Map-Reply to ITR; ITR caches EID-to-RLOC(s) mapping
7. ITR uses mapping to encapsulate to ETR; sends user packet to ETR
8. ETR decapsulates packet, delivers to Dest-EID
The ITR first sends a Map-Request packet, giving the destination EID
it needs a mapping for, to its MR. The MR will look in its cache of
delegation information to find the node which is closest in the
delegation tree to that destination EID which it has information for.
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If it does not have the RLOC of an appropriate MS, it will query the
DDT system, recursively if need be, in order to eventually find the
RLOC of such an MS.
When it has the MS's RLOC, it will send the Map-Request on to the MS,
which then sends it on to an appropriate ETR. The ETR sends a Map-
Reply to the ITR which needs the mapping; from then on, processing of
user packets through that ITR to that ultimate destination proceeds
as above.
Often (as with many ARP implementations), the original user packet
will have been discarded, and not queued waiting for the mapping to
be returned. When the host retransmits such a packet, the mapping
will be there, and the packet will be forwarded. Alternatively, it
might have been queued, or perhaps it was forwarded using a PITR.
(Section 4.4, "Interworking With Non-LISP-Capable Endpoints")>
8. Design Approach
Before describing LISP's components in more detail below, it it worth
pointing out that what may seem, in some cases, like odd (or poor)
design approaches do in fact result from the application of a
thought-through, and consistent, design philosophy used in creating
them.
This design philosophy is covered in detail in in [Perspective],
Section "Design"), and readers who are interested in the 'why' of
various mechanisms should consult that; reading it may make clearer
the reasons for some engineering choices in the mechanisms given
here.
9. Data Plane - xTRs
As mentioned above (in Section 6.1, "xTRs"), xTRs are the basic data-
handling devices in LISP, and, as such, form the LISP data plane.
This section explores some advanced topics related to xTRs.
Careful rules have been specified for both TTL and ECN [RFC3168] to
ensure that passage through xTRs does not interfere with the
operation of these mechanisms. In addition, care has been taken to
ensure that 'traceroute' works when xTRs are involved.
9.1. When to Encapsulate
An ITR knows that an ultimate destination is 'running' LISP (remember
that the destination machine itself probably knows nothing about
LISP), and thus that it should perform LISP processing on a packet
(including potential encapsulation) if it has an entry in its local
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mapping cache that covers the destination EID.
Conversely, if the cache contains a 'negative' entry (indicating that
the ITR has previously attempted to find a mapping that covers this
EID, and it has been informed by the mapping system that no such
mapping exists), it knows the ultimate destination is not running
LISP, and the packet can be forwarded natively (i.e. not LISP-
encapsulated).
Note that the ITR cannot simply depend on the appearance, or non-
appearance, of the destination in the routing tables in the DFZ, as a
way to tell if an ultimate destination is a LISP node or not. That
is because mechanisms to allow interoperation of LISP sites and
'legacy' sites necessarily involve advertising LISP sites' EIDs into
the DFZ; in other words, LISP sites which need to interoperate with
'legacy' nodes will appear in the DFZ routing tables, along with non-
LISP sites.
9.2. UDP Encapsulation Details
The UDP encapsulation used by LISP for carrying traffic from ITR to
ETR, and many of the details of how it works, were all chosen for
very practical reasons.
Use of UDP (instead of, say, a LISP-specific protocol number) was
driven by the fact that many devices filter out 'unknown' protocols,
so adopting a non-UDP encapsulation would have made the initial
deployment of LISP harder - and our goal (see Section 3.1,
"Economics") was to make the deployment as easy as possible.
The UDP source port in the encapsulated packet is a 5-way hash of the
original source and ultimate destination in the inner header, along
with the ports, and the protocol.
This is because many ISPs use multiple parallel paths (so-called
'Equal Cost Multi-Path'), and load-share across them. Using such a
hash in the source-port in the outer header both allows LISP traffic
to be load-shared, and also ensures that packets from individual
connections are delivered in order (since most ISPs try to ensure
that packets for a particular {source, source port, destination,
destination port} tuple flow along a single path, and do not become
disordered).
The UDP checksum is zero because the inner packet usually already has
a end-end checksum, and the outer checksum adds no value. [Saltzer]
In most exising hardware, computing such a checksum (and checking it
at the other end) would also present an intolerable load, for no
benefit.
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9.3. Header Control Channel
LISP provides a multiplexed channel in the encapsulation header. It
is mostly (but not entirely) used for control purposes. (See
[Perspective], Section "Architecture-Piggyback" for a longer
discussion of the architectural implications of performing control
functions with data traffic.)
The general concept is that the header starts with an 8-bit 'flags'
field, and it also includes two data fields (one 24 bits, one 32),
the contents and meaning of which vary, depending on which flags are
set. This allows these fields to be 'multiplexed' among a number of
different low-duty-cycle functions, while minimizing the space
overhead of the LISP encapsulation header.
9.3.1. Mapping Versioning
One important use of the multiplexed control channel is mapping
versioning; i.e. the discovery of when the mapping cached in an ITR
is outdated. To allow an ITR to discover this, identifying sequence
numbers are applied to different versions of a mappping. [RFC6834]
This allows an ITR to easily discover when a cached mapping has been
updated by a more recent variant.
Version numbers are available in control messages (Map-Replies), but
the initial concept is that to limit control message overhead, the
versioning mechanism should primarily use the multiplex user data
header control channel.
Versioning can operate in both directions: an ITR can advise an ETR
what version of a mapping it is currently using (so the ETR can
notify it if there is a more recent version), and ETRs can let ITRs
know what the current mapping version is (so the ITRs can request an
update, if their copy is outdated).
At the moment version numbers are manually assigned, and ordered.
Some felt that this was non-optimal, and that a better approach would
have been to have 'fingerprints' which were computed from the current
mapping data (i.e. a hash). It is not clear that the ordering buys
much (if anything), and the potential for mishaps with manually
configured version numbers is self-evident.
9.3.2. Echo Nonces
Another important use of the header control channel is for a
mechanism known as the Nonce Echo, which is used as an efficient
method for ITRs to check the reachability of correspondent ETRs.
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Basically, an ITR which wishes to ensure that an ETR is up, and
reachable, sends a nonce to that ETR, carried in the encapsulation
header; when that ETR (acting as an ITR) sends some other user data
packet back to the ITR (acting in turn as an ETR), that nonce is
carried in the header of that packet, allowing the original ITR to
confirm that its packets are reaching that ETR.
Note that lack of a response is not necessarily _proof_ that
something has gone wrong - but it stronly suggests that something
has, so other actions (e.g. a switch to an alternative ETR, if one is
listed; a direct probe; etc) are advised.
(See Section 13.5, "Neighbour ETR Reachability", for more about Echo
Nonces.)
9.3.3. Instances
Another use of these header fields is for 'Instances' - basically,
support for VPN's across backbones. [RFC4026] Since there is only
one destination UDP port used for carriage of user data packets, and
the source port is used for multiplexing (above), there is no other
way to differentiate among different destination address namespaces
(which are often overlapped in VPNs).
9.4. Probing
RLOC-Probing (see [RFC6830], Section 6.3.2. "RLOC-Probing Algorithm"
for details) is a mechanism method that an ITR can use to determine
with certainty that an ETR is up and reachable from the ITR. As a
side-benfit, it gives a rough RTT estimates.
It is quite a simple mechanism - an ITR simply sends a specially
marked Map-Request directly to the ETR it wishes information about;
that ETR sends back a specially marked Map-Reply. A Map-Request and
Map-Reply are used, rather than a special probing control-message
pair, because as a side-benefit the ITR can discover if the mapping
has been updated since it cached it.
The probing mechanism is rather heavy-weight and expensive (compared
to mechanisms like the Echo-Nonce), since it costs a control message
from each side, so it should only be used sparingly. However, it has
the advantages of providing information quickly (a single RTT), and
being a simple, direct robust way of doing so.
If the number of neighbour ETRs of the ITR is large, use of RLOC-
Probing to check on their reachability will result in considerable
control traffic; such control traffic has to be spread out to prevent
a load peak.
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Obviously, if RLOC-Probing is the only mechanism being used to detect
unreachable neighbour ETRs, the rate at which RLOC-Probing is done
will control the timeliness of the detection of loss of reachability.
There is thus a tradeoff between overhead and responsiveness,
particular when an ITR has a large fanout of neighbour ETRs.
A further observation is that unless what are likely unreasonable
amounts of RLOC Probing are being done, Echo Nonce will generally
provide faster notification of loss of reachability (unless there is
little or no bi-directional traffic between the ITR and ETR).
9.5. Mapping Lifetimes and Timeouts
Mappings come with a Time-To-Live, which indicate how long the
creator of the mapping expects them to be useful for. The TTL may
also indicate that the mapping should not be cached at all, or it can
indicate that it has no particular lifetime, and the recipient can
chose how long to store it.
Mappings might also be discarded before the TTL expires, depending on
what strategies the ITR is using to maintain its cache; if the
maximum cache size is fixed, or the ITR needs to reclaim memory,
mappings which have not been used 'recently' may be discarded.
(After all, there is no harm in so doing; a future reference will
merely cause that mapping to be reloaded.)
9.6. Security of Mapping Lookups
LISP provides an optional mechanism to secure the obtaining of
mappings by an ITR. [LISP-SEC] It provides protection against
attackers generating spurious Map-Reply messages (including replaying
old Map-Replies), and also against 'over-claiming' attacks (where a
malicious ETR by claims EID-prefixes which are larger what what have
been actually delegated to it).
Very briefly, the ITR provided a One-Time Key with its Map-Request;
this key is used by both the MS (to sign an affirmation that it has
delegated that EID block to that ETR), and indirectly by the ETR (to
sign the mapping that it is returning to the ITR).
The specification for LISP-SEC suggests that the ITR-MR stage be
cryptographically protected, and indicates that the existing
mechanisms for securing the ETR-MS stage are used to protect Map-
Rquests also. It does assume that the channel from the MR to the MS
is secure (otherwise an attacker could obtain the OTK from the Map-
Request and use it to forge a reply).
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9.7. Mapping Gleaning in ETRs
As an optimization to the mapping acquisition process, ETRs are
allowed to 'glean' mappings from incoming user data packets, and also
from incoming Map-Request control messages. This is not secure, and
so any such mapping must be 'verified' by sending a Map-Request to
get an authoritative mapping. (See further discussion of the
security implications of this in [Perspective], Section "Security-
xTRs".)
The value of gleaning is that most communications are two-way, and so
if host A is sending packets to host B (therefore needing B's
EID->RLOC mapping), very likely B will soon be sending packets back
to A (and thus needing A's EID->RLOC mapping). Without gleaning,
this would sometimes result in a delay, and the dropping of the first
return packet; this is felt to be very undesirable.
9.8. Fragmentation
Several mechanisms have been proposed for dealing with packets which
are too large to transit the path from a particular ITR to a given
ETR.
In one, called the 'stateful' approach, the ITR keeps a per-ETR
record of the maximum size allowed, and sends an ICMP Too Big message
to the original source host when a packet which is too large is seen.
In the other, referred to as the 'stateless' approach, for IPv4
packets without the 'DF' bit set, too-large packets are fragmented,
and then the fragments are forwarded; all other packets are
discarded, and an ICMP Too Big message returned.
It is not clear at this point which approach is preferable.
10. Control Plane - The Mapping System
As discussed already in Section 6.2, " The Mapping System", the LISP
mapping system is the most important part of LISP's control plane: it
i) maintains the database of mappings between EIDs, and the RLOCs at
which they are to be found, and ii) provides those mappings to ITRs
which request them, so that the ITRs can send traffic for a given EID
to the correct RLOC(s) for that EID.
RFC 1034 ("DNS Concepts and Facilities") has this to say about the
DNS name to IP address database and mapping system:
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"The sheer size of the database and frequency of updates suggest
that it must be maintained in a distributed manner, with local
caching to improve performance. Approaches that attempt to
collect a consistent copy of the entire database will become more
and more expensive and difficult, and hence should be avoided."
and this observation applies equally to the LISP mapping database and
mapping system.
To briefly recap, the mapping system is split into three parts: i) an
indexing sub-system, which keeps track of where all the mappings are
kept; ii) the interface to the indexing system (which remains the
same, even if the actual indexing system is changed); and iii) the
mappings themselves, the authoritative copies of which are always
held by ETRs.
10.1. The Mapping System Interface
As mentioned in Section 6.2.2, "Interface to the Mapping System",
both of the inferfaces to the mapping system (from ITRs, and ETRs)
are standardized, so that the more numerous xTRs do not have to be
modified when the mapping indexing sub-system is changed.
(This precaution has already allowed the mapping system to be
upgraded during LISP's evolution, when ALT was replaced by DDT.)
This section describes the interfaces in a little more detail; for
details, see [RFC6833].
10.1.1. Map-Request Messages
The Map-Request message contains a number of fields, the two most
important of which are the requested EID block identifier (remember
that individual mappings may cover a block of EIDs, not just a single
EID), and the Address Family Identifier (AFI) for that EID block.
Other important fields are the source EID (and its AFI), and one or
more RLOCs for the source EID, along with their AFIs. Multiple RLOCs
are included to ensure that at least one is in a form which will
allow the reply to be returned to the requesting ITR, and the source
EID is used for a variety of functions, including 'gleaning' (see
Section 9.7, " Mapping Gleaning in ETRs").
Finally, the message includes a long nonce, for simple, efficient
protection against offpath attackers (see [Perspective], Section
"Security-xTRs" for more), and a variety of other fields and control
flag bits.
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10.1.2. Map-Reply Messages
The Map-Reply message looks similar, except it includes the mapping
entry for the requested EID(s), which contains one or more RLOCs and
their associated data. (Note that the reply may cover a larger block
of the EID namespace than the request; most requests will be for a
single EID, the one which prompted the query.)
If there are no mappings available at all for the EID(s) requested, a
'Negative Map-Reply' message will be returned. This is a Map-Reply
message with flag bits set to indicate that fact.
For each RLOC in the entry, there is the RLOC, its AFI, priority and
weight fields (see Section 6.2, " The Mapping System"), and multicast
priority and weight fields (see Section 11, "Multicast Support in
LISP"> for more about multicast support in LISP).
10.1.2.1. Solicit-Map-Request Messages
"Solicit-Map-Request" (SMR) messages are actually not another message
type, but a sub-type of Map-Reply messages. They include a special
flag which indicates to the recipient that it _should_ send a new
Map-Request message, to refresh its mapping, because the ETR has
detected that the one it is using is out-dated.
SMR's, like most other control traffic, is rate-limited.
10.1.3. Map-Register and Map-Notify Messages
The Map-Register message contains authentication information, and a
number of mapping records, each with an individual Time-To-Live
(TTL). Each of the records contains an EID (potentially, a block of
EIDs) and its AFI, a version number for this mapping (see
Section 9.3.1, "Section 9.3.1 format="title"/>"), and a number of
RLOCs and their AFIs.
Each RLOC entry also includes the same data as in the Map-Replies
(i.e. priority and weight); this is because in some circumstances it
is advantageous to allow the MS to proxy reply on the ETR's behalf to
Map-Request messages, and the MS needs this information when it does
so (see [Mobility]).
Map-Notify messages have the exact same contents as Map-Register
messages; they are purely acknowledgements (although planned LISP
functionality extensions may give them other functions as well).
The entire interaction can be authenticated by use of a shared key,
configured in the MS and ETR. Although the protocol does already
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allow for replacement of the encryption algorithm, it does not
support automated key management (although it appears to fall under
the exclusions in [RFC4107]).
10.2. The DDT Indexing Sub-system
As previously mentioned in Section 6.2.3, "Indexing Sub-system", the
indexing sub-system in LISP is currently the DDT system.
The overall operation is fairly simple; an MR which needs a mapping
starts at a server for the root DDT node (there will normally be more
than one such server available, for both performance and robustness
reasons), and through a combination of cached delegation information,
and repetitive querying of a sequence of DDT servers, works its way
down the delegation tree until it arrives at an MS which is
authoritative (responsible?) for the block of EID namespace which
holds the destination EID in question.
The interaction between MRs and DDT servers is not complex; the MR
sends the DDT server a Map-Request control message. The DDT server
uses its data (which is configured, and static) to see whether it is
directly peered to an MS which can answer the request, or if it has a
child (or children, if replicated) which is responsible for that
portion of the EID namespace.
If it has children configured which are responsible, it will reply to
the MR with another kind of LISP control message, a Map-Referral
message, which provides information about the delegation of the block
containing the requested EID. This process is secured; see
Section 10.4, "Security of the DDT Indexing Sub-system", for more.
The Map-Referral also gives the RLOCs of all the machines which are
DDT servers for that block. and the MR can then send Map-Requests to
any one (or all) of them. In addition, the Map-Referral includes key
data for the children, which allows any information provided by them
to be cryptographically verified.
Control flags in the Map-Referral indicate to the querying MR whether
the referral is to another DDT node, an MS, or an ETR. If the
former, the MR then sends the Map-Request to the child DDT node,
repeating the process.
If the latter, the MR then interacts with that MS, and usually the
block's ETR(s) as well, to cause a mapping to be sent to the ITR
which queried the MR for it. (Recall that some MS's provide Map-
Replies on behalf of an associated ETR, in so-called 'proxy mode', so
in such cases the Map-Reply will come from the MS, not the ETR. )
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Delegations are cached in the MRs, so that once an MR has received
information about a delegation, it will not need to look that up
again. Once it has been in operation for a short while, it will only
need to ask for delegation information which is has not yet asked
about - probably only the last stage in a delegation to a 'leaf' MS.
As describe below (Section 10.6, "Performance of the Mapping
System"), significant amounts of modeling and performance measurement
have been performed, to verify that DDT has (and will continue to
have) acceptable performance.
10.2.1. Map-Referral Messages
Map-Referral messages look almost identical to Map-Reply messages,
except that the RLOCs potentially name either i) other DDT nodes
(children in the delegation tree), or ii) terminal MSs.
10.3. Reliability via Replication
Everywhere throughout the mapping system, robustness to operational
failures is obtained by replicating data in multiple instances of any
particular node (of whatever type). Map-Resolvers, Map-Servers, DDT
nodes, ETRs - all of them can be replicated, and the protocol
supports this replication.
The deployed DDT system actually uses anycast [RFC4786], along with
replicated servers, to improve both performance and robustness.
There are generally no mechanisms specified yet to ensure coherence
between multiple copies of any particular data item (e.g. the copies
of delegation data for a particular block of namespace, in DDT
sibling servers) - this is currently a manual responsibility.
If and when LISP protocol adoption proceeds, an automated layer to
perform this functionality can 'easily' be layered on top of the
existing mechanisms.
10.4. Security of the DDT Indexing Sub-system
LISP provides an advanced model for securing the mapping indexing
system, in line with the overall LISP security philosophy.
Briefly, securing the mapping indexing system is broken into two
parts: the interface between the clients of the system (MR's) and the
mapping indexing system itself, and the interaction between the DDT
nodes/servers which make it up.
The client interface provides only a single model, using the
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'canonical' public-private key system (starting from a trust anchor),
in which the child's public key is provided by the parent, along with
the delegation. When the child returns any data, it can sign the
data, and the requestor can use that signature to verify the data.
This requires very little configuration in the clients, and is fairly
secure.
The interface between the DDT nodes/servers allows for choices
between a number of different options, allowing the operators to
trade off among configuration complexity, security level, etc. This
is based on experience with DNS-SEC ([RFC4033]), where configuration
complexity in the servers has been a major stumbling block to
deployment.
See [Perspective], Section "Security-Mappings" for more.
10.5. Extended Tools
In addition to the priority and weight data items in mappings, LISP
offers other tools to enhance functionality, particularly in the
traffic engineering area.
One is 'source-specific mappings', i.e. the ETR may return different
mappings to the enquiring ITR, depending on the identity of the ITR.
This allows very fine-tuned traffic engineering, far more powerful
than routing-based TE.
10.6. Performance of the Mapping System
Prior to the creation of DDT, a large study of the performance of the
previous mapping system, ALT ([ALT]), along with a proposed new
design called TREE (which used DNS to hold delegation information)
provided considerable insight into the likely performance of the
mapping systems at larger scale. [Jakab] The basic structure and
concepts of DDT are identical to those of TREE, so the performance
simulation work done for that design applies aequally to DDT.
In that study, as with earlier LISP performance analyses, extensive
large-scale simulations were driven by lengthy recordings of actual
traffic at several major sites; one was the site in the first study
([Iannone]), and the other was an even large university, with roughly
35,000 users.
The results showed that a system like DDT, which caches information
about delegations, and allows the MR to communicate directly with the
lower nodes on the delegation hierarchy based on cached delegation
information, would have good performance, with average resolution
times on the order of the MR to MS RTT. This verified the
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effectiveness of this particular type of indexing system.
A more recent study, [Saucez], has measured actual resolution times
in the deployed LISP network; it took measurements from a variety of
locations in the Internet, with respect to a number of different
target EIDs. Average measured resolution delays ranged from roughly
175 msec to 225 msec, depending on the location.
11. Multicast Support in LISP
Multicast ([RFC3170], [RFC5110]) may seem an odd thing to support
with LISP, since LISP is all about separating identity from location,
and although a multicast group in some sense has an identity, it
certainly does not have _a_ location.
However, multicast is very important to some users of the network,
for a number of reasons: doing multiple unicast streams is
inefficient, as it is easy to use up all the upstream bandwidth;
without multicast a server can also be saturated fairly easily in
doing the unicast replication; etc.
So it is important for LISP to work well with multicast; doing so has
been a significant focus in LISP throughout its entire development.
Further very significant improvements to multicast support in LISP
are in progress; see [Improvements], Section "Multicast" for more on
them.
11.1. Basic Concepts of Multicast Support in LISP
This section introduces most of the basic principles of multicast
support in LISP.
Since group addresses name distributed collective entities, in
general they cannot have a single RLOC (although they may, after
future improvements in multicast support in LISP, have multiple
RLOCs); also, since they usually refer to collections of entities,
they aren't really EIDs either.
A multicast source at a LISP site may not be able to become the root
of a distribution tree in the core if it uses its EID as its identity
for that distribution tree (i.e. a distribution tree (S-EID, G));
that is because there may not be a route to its EID in the core
(assuming that its section of the core even supports multicast; not
all parts of the core do).
Therefore, outside the LISP site, multicast state for the
distribution tree (S-RLOC, G) needs to be built instead, where S-RLOC
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is the RLOC of the ITR that the multicast source inside the LISP site
will be sending its traffic through.
Similarly, multicast receivers must join using the RLOC of the ETR
through which traffic will be forward to them.
Multicast LISP requires no packet format changes to existing
multicast packets (both control, and user data). The initial
multicast support in LISP uses existing multicast control mechanisms
exclusively; improvements currently being worked on provide LISP-
specific control mechanisms (see [Improvements], Section "Multicast",
for more).
11.2. Initial Multicast Support in LISP
Readers who wish to fully understand multicast support need to
consult the appropriate specifications: LISP multicast issues are
discussed in [RFC6830], Section 11; and see [RFC6831] for the full
details of current multicast support in LISP.
In the current simple operating mode (covered in [RFC6831]),
destination group addresses are not mapped; only the source address
(when the original source is inside a LISP site) needs to be mapped,
both during distribution tree setup, as well as actual traffic
delivery.
In other words, while LISP's mapping capability is used, at this
stage it is only applied to the source, not the destination (as with
most LISP activity). Thus, in LISP-encapsulated multicast packets in
this mode, the inner source is the EID, and the outer source is the
EID's RLOC; both inner and outer destinations are the group's
multicast address.
Note that this does mean that if the group is using separate source-
specific trees for distribution, there isn't a separate distribution
tree outside the LISP site for each different source of traffic to
the group from inside the LISP site; they are all lumped together
under a single source, the RLOC.
The issue of encapsulation is complex, because if the rest of the
group outside the LISP site includes some members which are at other
LISP sites (i.e. packets to them have to be encapsulated), and some
members at legacy sites (i.e. encapsulated packets would not be
understood), there is no simple answer. (The situation becomes even
more complex when one considers that as hosts leave and joint the
group, it may switch back and forth between 'mixed' and
'homogenous'.)
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This issue is too complex to fully cover here; see Section 9.2.,
"LISP Sites with Mixed Address Families", in [RFC6831], for complete
coverage of this issue.
Basically, there are multicast equivalents of some of the legacy
interoperability mechanisms used for unicast; mPITRs and mPETRs
(multicast-capable PITRs and PETRs) etc. When 'mixed' groups are a
possibility, two choices are available: i) send two copies (one
encapsulated, and one not) of all traffic, or ii) employ mPETRs to
distribute non-encapsulated copies to 'legacy' group members.
12. Deployment Issues and Mechanisms
This section discusses several deployment issues in more detail.
With LISP's heavy emphasis on practicality, much work has gone into
making sure it works well in the real-world environments most people
have to deal with.
12.1. LISP Deployment Needs
As mentioned earlier (Section 3.2, "Maximize Re-use of Existing
Mechanism"), LISP requires no change to almost all existing hosts and
routers. Obviously, however, one must deploy _something_ to run
LISP! Exactly what that has to be will depend greatly on the details
of the site's existing networking gear, and choices it makes for how
to achieve LISP deployment.
The primary requirement is for one or more xTRs. These may be
existing routers, just with new software loads, or it may require the
deployment of new devices.
LISP also requires a certain amount of LISP-specific support
infrastructure, such as MRs, MSs, the DDT hierarchy, etc but much of
this will either i) already be deployed, and if the new site can make
arrangements to use it, it need do nothing else, or ii) those
functions the site must provide may be co-located in other LISP
devices (again, either new devices, or new software on existing
ones).
12.2. Interworking Mechanism
One aspect which has received a lot of attention are the mechanisms
previously referred to (in Section 4.4, "Interworking With Non-LISP-
Capable Endpoints") to allow interoperation of LISP sites with so-
called 'legacy' sites which are not running LISP (yet).
To briefly refresh what was said there, there are two main approaches
to such interworking: proxy nodes (PITRs and PETRs), and an
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alternative mechanism using device with combined NAT and LISP
functionality; these are described in more detail here.
12.2.1. Proxy Devices
PITRs (proxy ITRs) serve as ITRs for traffic _from_ legacy hosts to
nodes using LISP. PETRs (proxy ETRs) serve as ETRs for LISP traffic
_to_ legacy hosts (for cases where a LISP device cannot send packets
directly to such hosts, without encapsulation).
Note that return traffic _to_ a legacy host from a LISP-using node
does not necessarily have to pass through an ITR/PETR pair - the
original packets can usually just be sent directly to the ultimate
destination. However, for some kinds of LISP operation (e.g. mobile
nodes), this is not possible; in these situations, the PETR is
needed.
12.2.1.1. PITRs
PITRs (proxy ITRs) serve as ITRs for traffic _from_ legacy hosts to
nodes using LISP. To do that, they have to advertise into the
existing legacy backbone Internet routing the availability of
whatever ranges of EIDs (i.e. of nodes using LISP) they are proxying
for, so that legacy hosts will know where to send traffic to those
LISP nodes.
As mentioned previously (Section 9.1, "When to Encapsulate"), an ITR
at another LISP site can avoid using a PITR (i.e. it can detect that
a given ultimate destination is not a legacy host, if a PITR is
advertising it into the DFZ) by checking to see if a LISP mapping
exists for that ultimate destination.
This technique obviously has an impact on routing table in the DFZ,
but it is not clear yet exactly what that impact will be; it is very
dependent on the collected details of many individual deployment
decisions.
A PITR may cover a group of EID blocks with a single EID
advertisement, in order to reduce the number of routing table entries
added. (In fact, at the moment, aggressive aggregation of EID
announcements is performed, precisely to to minimize the number of
new announced routes added by this technique.)
At the same time, if a site does traffic engineering with LISP
instead of fine-grained BGP announcement, that will help keep table
sizes down (and this is true even in the early stages of LISP
deployment). The same is true for multi-homing.
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12.2.1.2. PETRs
PETRs (proxy ETRs) serve as ETRs for LISP traffic _to_ legacy hosts,
for cases where a LISP device cannot send packets to such hosts
without encapsulation. That typically happens for one of two
reasons.
First, it will happen in places where some device is implementing
Unicast Reverse Path Forwarding (uRPF), to prevent a variety of
negative behaviour; originating packets with the original source's
EID in the source address field will result in them being filtered
out and discarded.
Second, it will happen when a LISP site wishes to send packets to a
non-LISP site, and the path in between does not support the
particular IP protocol version used by the original source along its
entire length. Use of a PETR on the other side of the 'gap' will
allow the LISP site's packet to 'hop over' the gap, by utilizing
LISP's built-in support for mixed protocol encapsulation.
PETRs are generally paired with specific ITRs, which have the
location of their PETRs configured into them. In other words, unlike
normal ETRS, PETRs do not have to register themselves in the mapping
database, on behalf of any legacy sites they serve.
Also, allowing an ITR to always send traffic leaving a site to a PETR
does avoid having to chose whether or not to encapsulate packets; it
can just always encapsulate packets, sending them to the PETR if it
has no specific mapping for the ultimate destination. However, this
is not advised: as mentioned, it is easy to tell if something is a
legacy destination.
12.2.2. LISP-NAT
A LISP-NAT device, as previously mentioned, combines LISP and NAT
functionality, in order to allow a LISP site which is internally
using addresses which cannot be globally routed to communicate with
non-LISP sites elsewhere in the Internet. (In other words, the
technique used by the PITR approach simply cannot be used in this
case.)
To do this, a LISP-NAT performs the usual NAT functionality, and
translates a host's source address(es) in packets passing through it
from an 'inner' value to an 'outer' value, and storing that
translation in a table, which it can use to similarly process
subsequent packets (both outgoing and incoming). [RFC6832]
There are two main cases where this might apply:
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- Sites using non-routable global addresses
- Sites using private addresses [RFC1918]
12.3. Use Through NAT Devices
Like them or not (and NAT devices have many egregious issues - some
inherent in the nature of the process of mapping addresses; others,
such as the brittleness due to non-replicated critical state, caused
by the way NATs were introduced, as stand-alone 'invisible' boxes),
NATs are both ubiquitous, and here to stay for a long time to come.
[RFC1631] Thus, in the actual Internet of today, having any new
mechanisms function well in the presence of NATs (i.e. with LISP xTRs
behind a NAT device) is absolutely necessary.
LISP has produced a variety of mechanisms to do this. The earliest
mechanism to support them had major limitations; it, and its
limitations, are described in Appendix B.5, "Early NAT Support". A
more recent proposed mechanism, which avoids those limitations, is
described in [Improvements], Section "Improved NAT Support".
12.4. LISP and DFZ Routing
One of LISP's original motivations was to try and control the growth
of the size of the so-called 'Default-Free-Zone' (DFZ), the core of
the Internet, the part where routes to _all_ destinations must be
available. As LISP becomes more widely deployed, it can help with
this issue, in a variety of ways.
In covering this topic, one must recognize that conditions in various
stages of LISP deployment (in terms of ubiquity) will have a large
influence. [Deployment] introduced useful terminology for this
progression, in addition to some coverage of the topic (see Section
5, "Migration to LISP"):
The loosely defined terms of "early transition phase", "late
transition phase", and "LISP Internet phase" refer to time periods
when LISP sites are a minority, a majority, or represent all edge
networks respectively.
In the early phases of deployment, two primary effects will allow
LISP to have a positive impact on the routing table growth:
- Using LISP for traffic engineering instead of BGP
- Aggregation of smaller PI sites into a single PITR advertisement
The first is fairly obvious (doing TE with BGP requires injecting
more-specific routes into the DFZ routing tables, something doing TE
with LISP avoids); the second is not guaranteed to happen (since it
requires coordination among a number of different parties), and only
time will tell if it does happen.
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12.4.1. Long-term Possibilities
At a later stage of the deployment, a more aggressive approach
becomes available: taking part of the DFZ, one for which all 'stub'
sites connected to it have deployed LISP, and removing all 'EID
routes' (used for backwards compatability with 'legacy' sites); only
RLOC routes would remain in the routing table in that part of the
Internet backbone.
Obviously there would be a boundary between the two parts of the DFZ,
and the routers on the border would have to (effectively) become
PITRs, and inject routes to all of the LISP sites 'behind' them into
the 'legacy' DFZ (to coin a name for the part of the DFZ which, for
reasons of interoperability with legacy sites, still carries EID
routes).
Note that it is likely not feasible to have the 'RLOC only' part of
the DFZ in the 'middle' of the DFZ; that would require (effectively)
EID routes to be removed from BGP on crossing the boundary _into_ the
RLOC DFZ, but re-created on crossing the boundary _out_ of the RLOC
DFZ. This is likely to be impractical, leading to the suggestion of
a simpler boundary between the RLOC-only part of the DFZ, and the
'legacy' DFZ.
The mechanism for detecting which routes are 'EID routes' and which
are 'RLOC routes' (required for the boundary routers to be able to
filter out the 'EID routes') would also need to be worked out; the
most likely appears to be something involving BGP attributes.
13. Fault Discovery/Handling
LISP is, in terms of its functionality, a fairly simple system: the
list of failure modes is thus not extensive.
13.1. Handling Missing Mappings
Handling of missing mappings is fairly simple: the ITR calls for the
mapping, and in the meantime can either discard traffic to that
ultimate destination (as many ARP implementations do) [RFC826], or,
if dropping the traffic is deemed undesirable, it can forward them
via a 'default PITR'.
A number of PITRs advertise all EID blocks into the backbone routing,
so that any ITRs which are temporarily missing a mapping can forward
the traffic to these default PITRs via normal transmission methods,
where they are encapsulated and passed on.
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13.2. Outdated Mappings
If a mapping changes once an ITR has retrieved it, that may result in
traffic to the EIDs covered by that mapping failing. There are three
cases to consider:
- When the ETR traffic is being sent to is still a valid ETR for
that EID, but the mapping has been updated (e.g. to change the
priority of various ETRs)
- When the ETR traffic is being sent to is still an ETR, but no
longer a valid ETR for that EID
- When the ETR traffic is being sent to is no longer an ETR
13.2.1. Outdated Mappings - Updated Mapping
A 'mapping versioning' system, whereby mappings have version numbers,
and ITRs are notified when their mapping is out of date, has been
added to detect this, and the ITR responds by refreshing the mapping.
[RFC6834]
13.2.2. Outdated Mappings - Wrong ETR
If an ITR is holding an outdated cached mapping, it may send packets
to an ETR which is no longer an ETR for that EID.
It might be argued that if the ETR is properly managing the lifetimes
on its mapping entries, this 'cannot happen', but it is a wise design
methodology to assume that 'cannot happen' events will in fact happen
(as they do, due to software errors, or, on rare occasions, hardware
faults), and ensure that the system will handle them properly (if,
perhaps not in the most expeditious, or 'clean' way - they are, after
all, very unlikely to happen).
ETRs can easily detect cases where this happpens, after they have un-
wrapped a user data packet; in response, they send a Solicit-Map-
Request to the source ITR to cause it to refresh its mapping.
13.2.3. Outdated Mappings - No Longer an ETR
In another case for what can happen if an ITR uses an outdated
mapping, the destination of traffic from an ITR might no longer be a
LISP device at all. In such cases, one might get an ICMP Destination
Unreachable error message. However, one cannot depend on that - and
in any event, that would provide an attack vector, so it should be
used with care. (See [RFC6830], Section 6.3, "Routing Locator
Reachability" for more about this.)
The following mechanism will work, though. Since the destination is
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not an ETR, the echoing reachability detection mechanism (see
Section 9.3.2, "Echo Nonces") will detect a problem. At that point,
the backstop mechanism, Probing, will kick in. Since the destination
is still not an ETR, that will fail, too.
At that point, traffic will be switched to a different ETR, or, if
none are available, a reload of the mapping may be initiated.
13.3. Erroneous Mappings
Again, this 'should not happen', but a good system should deal with
it. However, in practise, should this happen, it will produce one of
the prior two cases (the wrong ETR, or something that is not an ETR),
and will be handled as described there.
13.4. Neighbour ETR Liveness
The ITR, like all packet switches, needs to detect, and react, when
its neighbour ceases operation. As LISP traffic is effectively
always uni-directional (from ITR to ETR), this could be somewhat
problematic.
Solving a related problem, neighbour ETR reachability (below)
subsumes handling this fault mode, however.
Note that the two terms - liveness and reachability - are _not_
synonmous (although they are often confused). Liveness is a property
of a node - it is either up and functioning, or it is not.
Reachability is only a property of a particular _pair_ of nodes.
If packets sent from a first node to a second are successfully
received at the second, it is 'reachable' from the first. However,
the second node may at the very same time _not_ be reachable from
some other node. Reachability is _always_ a ordered pairwise
property, and of a specified ordered pair.
13.5. Neighbour ETR Reachability
A more significant issue than whether a particular ETR E is up or not
is, as mentioned above, that although ETR E may be up, attached to
the network, etc, an issue in the network, between a source ITR I and
E, may prevent traffic from I from getting to E. (Perhaps a routing
problem, or perhaps some sort of access control setting.)
The one-way nature of LISP traffic makes this situation hard to
detect in a way which is economic, robust and fast. Two out of the
three are usually not to hard, but all three at the same time - as is
highly desirable for this particular issue - are harder.
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In line with the LISP design philosophy ([Perspective], Section
"Design-Theoretical"), this problem is attacked not with a single
mechanism (which would have a hard time meeting all those three goals
simultaneously), but with a collection of simpler, cheaper
mechanisms, which collectively will usually meet all three.
They are reliance on the underlying routing system (which can of
course only reliably provide a negative reachabilty indication, not a
positive one), the echo nonce (which depends on some return traffic
from the destination xTR back to the source xTR), and finally direct
'pinging', in the case where no positive echo is returned.
(The last is not the first choice, as due to the large fan-out
expected of LISP devices, reliance on it as a sole mechanism would
produce a fair amount of overhead.)
14. Acknowledgments
The author would like to start by thanking all the members of the
core LISP group for their willingness to allow him to add himself to
their effort, and for their enthusiasm for whatever assistance he has
been able to provide.
He would also like to thank (in alphabetical order) Michiel Blokzijl,
Peter Chiappa, Vina Ermagan, Dino Farinacci, Vince Fuller and
Vasileios Lakafosis for their review of, and helpful suggestions for,
this document. (If I have missed anyone in this list, I apologize
most profusely.)
A very special thank you goes to Joel Halpern, who almost invariably,
when asked, promptly returned comments on intermediate versions of
this document. Grateful thanks go also to Darrel Lewis for his help
with material on non-Internet uses of LISP, and to Dino Farinacci and
Vince Fuller for answering detailed questions about some obscure LISP
topics.
A final thanks is due to John Wrocklawski for the author's
organizational affiliation, and to Vince Fuller for help with XML.
This memo was created using the xml2rfc tool.
I would like to dedicate this document to the memory of my parents,
who gave me so much, and whom I can no longer thank in person, as I
would have so much liked to be able to.
15. IANA Considerations
This document makes no request of the IANA.
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16. Security Considerations
This memo does not define any protocol and therefore creates no new
security issues.
17. References
17.1. Normative References
[AFI] IANA, "Address Family Indicators (AFIs)", Address
Family Numbers, January 2011, <http://www.iana.org/
assignments/address-family-numbers>.
[RFC768] J. Postel, "User Datagram Protocol", RFC 768,
August 1980.
[RFC791] J. Postel, "Internet Protocol", RFC 791,
September 1981.
[RFC2460] S. Deering and R. Hinden, "Internet Protocol,
Version 6 (IPv6) Specification", RFC 2460,
December 1998.
[RFC6830] D. Farinacci, V. Fuller, D. Meyer, and D. Lewis,
"The Locator/ID Separation Protocol (LISP)",
RFC 6830, January 2013.
[RFC6831] D. Farinacci, D. Meyer, J. Zwiebel, and S. Venaas,
"The Locator/ID Separation Protocol (LISP) for
Multicast Environments", RFC 6831, January 2013.
[RFC6832] D. Lewis, D. Meyer, D. Farinacci, and V. Fuller,
"Interworking between Locator/ID Separation Protocol
(LISP) and Non-LISP Sites", RFC 6832, January 2013.
[RFC6833] V. Fuller and D. Farinacci, "Locator/ID Separation
Protocol (LISP) Map-Server Interface", RFC 6833,
January 2013.
[RFC6834] L. Iannone, D. Saucez, and O. Bonaventure,
"Locator/ID Separation Protocol (LISP) Map-
Versioning", RFC 6834, January 2013.
[Perspective] J. N. Chiappa, "An Architectural Perspective on the
LISP Location-Identity Separation System",
draft-ietf-lisp-perspective-00 (work in progress),
February 2013.
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[Improvements] J. N. Chiappa, "An Overview of On-Going Improvements
to the LISP Location-Identity Separation System",
draft-chiappa-lisp-improvements-00 (work in
progress), September 2013.
[DDT] V. Fuller, D. Lewis, and D. Farinacci, "LISP
Delegated Database Tree", draft-ietf-lisp-ddt-01
(work in progress), March 2013.
[LISP-SEC] F. Maino, V. Ermagan, A. Cabellos-Aparicio,
D. Saucez, and O. Bonaventure, "LISP-Security (LISP-
SEC)", draft-ietf-lisp-sec-04 (work in progress),
October 2012.
[NAT-Traversal] V. Ermagan, D. Farinacci, D. Lewis, J. Skriver,
F. Maino, and C. White, "NAT traversal for LISP",
draft-ermagan-lisp-nat-traversal-03 (work in
progress), March 2013.
[Mobility] D. Farinacci, V. Fuller, D. Lewis, and D. Meyer,
"LISP Mobility Architecture", draft-meyer-lisp-mn-08
(work in progress), April 2012.
[Deployment] L. Jakab, A. Cabellos-Aparicio, F. Coras,
J. Domingo-Pascual, and D. Lewis, "LISP Network
Element Deployment Considerations",
draft-ietf-lisp-deployment-09 (work in progress),
July 2013.
[LISP-TE] D. Farinacci, P. Lahiri, and M. Kowal, "LISP Traffic
Engineering Use-Cases", draft-farinacci-lisp-te-03
(work in progress), July 2013.
17.2. Informative References
[NIC8246] A. McKenzie and J. Postel, "Host-to-Host Protocol
for the ARPANET", NIC 8246, Network Information
Center, SRI International, Menlo Park, CA,
October 1977.
[NSAP] International Organization for Standardization,
"Information Processing Systems - Open Systems
Interconnection - Basic Reference Model", ISO
Standard 7489.1984, 1984.
[IEN19] J. F. Shoch, "Inter-Network Naming, Addressing, and
Routing", IEN (Internet Experiment Note) 19,
January 1978.
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[RFC826] D. Plummer, "Ethernet Address Resolution Protocol",
RFC 826, November 1982.
[RFC1034] P. V. Mockapetris, "Domain Names - Concepts and
Facilities", RFC 1034, November 1987.
[RFC1498] J. H. Saltzer, "On the Naming and Binding of Network
Destinations", RFC 1498, (Originally published in:
'Local Computer Networks', edited by P. Ravasio et
al., North-Holland Publishing Company, Amsterdam,
1982, pp. 311-317.), August 1993.
[RFC1631] K. Egevang and P. Francis, "The IP Network Address
Translator (NAT)", RFC 1631, May 1994.
[RFC1918] Y. Rekhter, R. Moskowitz, D. Karrenberg,
G. J. de Groot, and E. Lear, "Address Allocation for
Private Internets", RFC 1918, February 1996.
[RFC1992] I. Castineyra, J. N. Chiappa, and M. Steenstrup,
"The Nimrod Routing Architecture", RFC 1992,
August 1996.
[RFC3168] K. Ramakrishnan, S. Floyd, and D. Black, "The
Addition of Explicit Congestion Notification (ECN)
to IP", RFC 3168, September 2001.
[RFC3170] B. Quinn and K. Almeroth, "IP Multicast
Applications: Challenges and Solutions", RFC 3170,
September 2001.
[RFC3272] D. Awduche, A. Chiu, A. Elwalid, I. Widjaja, and
X. Xiao, "Overview and Principles of Internet
Traffic Engineering", RFC 3272, May 2002.
[RFC4026] L. Andersson and T. Madsen, "Provider Provisioned
Virtual Private Network (VPN) Terminology",
RFC 4026, March 2005.
[RFC4033] R. Arends, R. Austein, M. Larson, D. Massey, and
S. Rose, "DNS Security Introduction and
Requirements", RFC 4033, March 2005.
[RFC4107] S. Bellovin and R. Housley, "Guidelines for
Cryptographic Key Management", RFC 4107, June 2005.
[RFC4116] J. Abley, K. Lindqvist, E. Davies, B. Black, and
V. Gill, "IPv4 Multihoming Practices and
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Limitations", RFC 4116, July 2005.
[RFC4786] J. Abley and K. Lindqvist, "Operation of Anycast
Services", RFC 4786, December 2006.
[RFC4984] D. Meyer, L. Zhang, and K. Fall, "Report from the
IAB Workshop on Routing and Addressing", RFC 4984,
September 2007.
[RFC5110] P. Savola, "Overview of the Internet Multicast
Routing Architecture", RFC 5110, January 2008.
[RFC5887] B. Carpenter, R. Atkinson, and H. Flinck,
"Renumbering Still Needs Work", RFC 5887, May 2010.
[RFC6115] T. Li, Ed., "Recommendation for a Routing
Architecture", RFC 6115, February 2011.
(Perhaps the most ill-named RFC of all time; it
contains nothing that could truly be called a
'routing architecture'.)
[ALT] V. Fuller, D. Farinacci, D. Meyer, and D. Lewis,
"Locator/ID Separation Protocol Alternative Logical
Topology (LISP+ALT)", RFC 6836, January 2013.
[LISP0] D. Farinacci, V. Fuller, and D. Oran, "Locator/ID
Separation Protocol (LISP)", draft-farinacci-lisp-00
(work in progress), January 2007.
[Future] J. N. Chiappa, "Potential Long-Term Developments
With the LISP System",
draft-chiappa-lisp-evolution-00 (work in progress),
October 2012.
[Baran] P. Baran, "On Distributed Communications Networks",
IEEE Transactions on Communications Systems Vol.
CS-12 No. 1, pp. 1-9, March 1964.
[Chiappa] J. N. Chiappa, "Endpoints and Endpoint Names: A
Proposed Enhancement to the Internet Architecture",
Personal draft (work in progress), 1999,
<http://www.chiappa.net/~jnc/tech/endpoints.txt>.
[Clark] D. D. Clark, "The Design Philosophy of the DARPA
Internet Protocols", in 'Proceedings of the
Symposium on Communications Architectures and
Protocols SIGCOMM '88', pp. 106-114, 1988.
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[Saltzer] J. H. Saltzer, D. P. Reed, and D. D. Clark, "End-To-
End Arguments in System Design", ACM TOCS, Vol 2,
No. 4, pp 277-288, November 1984.
[Heart] F. E. Heart, R. E. Kahn, S. M. Ornstein,
W. R. Crowther, and D. C. Walden, "The Interface
Message Processor for the ARPA Computer Network",
Proceedings AFIPS 1970 SJCC, Vol. 36, pp. 551-567.
[Iannone] L. Iannone and O. Bonaventure, "On the Cost of
Caching Locator/ID Mappings", in 'Proceedings of the
3rd International Conference on emerging Networking
EXperiments and Technologies (CoNEXT'07)', ACM, pp.
1-12, December 2007.
[Kim] J. Kim, L. Iannone, and A. Feldmann, "A Deep Dive
Into the LISP Cache and What ISPs Should Know About
It", in 'Proceedings of the 10th International IFIP
TC 6 Conference on Networking - Volume Part I
(NETWORKING '11)', IFIP, pp. 367-378, May 2011.
[CorasCache] F. Coras, A. Cabellos-Aparicio, and J. Domingo-
Pascual, "An Analytical Model for the LISP Cache
Size", in 'Proceedings of the 11th International
IFIP TC 6 Networking Conference: Part I', IFIP, pp.
409-420, May 2012.
[Jakab] L. Jakab, A. Cabellos-Aparicio, F. Coras, D. Saucez,
and O. Bonaventure, "LISP-TREE: A DNS Hierarchy to
Support the LISP Mapping System", in 'IEEE Journal
on Selected Areas in Communications', Vol. 28, No.
8, pp. 1332-1343, October 2010.
[Saucez] D. Saucez, L. Iannone, and B. Donnet, "A First
Measurement Look at the Deployment and Evolution of
the Locator/ID Separation Protocol", in 'ACM SIGCOMM
Computer Communication Review', Vol. 43 No. 2, pp.
37-43, April 2013.
[CorasBGP] F. Coras, D. Saucez, L. Jakab, A. Cabellos-Aparicio,
and J. Domingo-Pascual, "Implementing a BGP-free ISP
Core with LISP", in 'Proceedings of the Global
Communications Conference (GlobeCom)', IEEE, pp.
2772-2778, December 2012.
[Atkinson] R. Atkinson, "Revised draft proposed definitions",
RRG list message, Message-Id: 808E6500-97B4-4107-
8A2F-36BC913BE196@extremenetworks.com, 11 June 2007,
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<http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/ram/current/
msg01470.html>.
[Bibliography] J. N. Chiappa (editor), "LISP (Location/Identity
Separation Protocol) Bibliography", Personal
site (work in progress), July 2013, <http://
www.chiappa.net/~jnc/tech/lisp/LISPbiblio.html>.
Appendix A. Glossary/Definition of Terms
For those who are unfamiliar with the scholarly notation 'q.v.', it
stands for 'quod vide', which is Latin for 'which see' (literally);
in other words, that term also is defined here.
- Name: In this document, and in much of computer science, a 'name'
simply refers to an identifier for an object or entity. Names
have both semantics (meaning) and syntax (form).[RFC1498]
- Namespace: A group of names (q.v.) with matching semantics and
syntax; they usually, but not always, refer to members of a class
of identical objects.
- Node: The general term used to describe any sort of communicating
entity; it might be a physical or a virtual host, or a mobile
device of some sort. It was deliberately chosen for use in this
document precisely because its definition is not fixed, and
therefore unlikely to cause erroneous images in the minds of
readers. You will not go far wrong if you think of a node as
being something like a host.
- Switch: A packet switch, in the general meaning of that term.
- Endpoint, end-end communication entity: the fate-sharing region at
one end of an end-end communication; the collection of state
related to both the reliable end-end communication channel, and
the applications running there.
- IPvN: IPv4 or IPv6; the two are so similar, in fundamental
architecture, that in much discussion about their capabilities,
limitations, etc statements about the apply equally to both, and
to continually say "IPv4 and IPv6" quickly becomes tedious.
- Address: In this document, and in current IPvN and similar
networking suites, a 'name' (q.v.) which has mixed semantics, in
that it includes both identity ('who') and location ('where')
semantics.
- Identifier: Here, and in current networking discussions, a 'name'
(q.v.) which has purely identity semantics.
- Locator: Originally defined as a 'name' with location semantics
only, and one that was not necessarily carried in every packet (as
was assumed of 'addresses') [RFC1992], it is now generally taken,
including here, to mean a 'name' with purely location semantics.
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- EID, Enpoint Identifier: Originally defined as a name for an
'endpoint' (see the reference), one with purely identity
semantics, and globally unique, and with syntax of relatively
short fixed length [Chiappa]. It is used in the LISP work to mean
the 'identifier' (q.v.) of a node; it is the input to an EID->RLOC
lookup in the 'mapping system' (q.v.); it is usually an IPvN
address. The source and adestination addresses of the innermost
header in a LISP packet are usually EIDs.
- RLOC, Routing Locator: a LISP-specific term meaning the locator of
an entity identified by an EID; as such, it is often the output of
an EID->RLOC lookup in the 'mapping system' (q.v.); it is usually
an IPvN address, and of an ETR. The source and adestination
addresses of the outermost header in a LISP packet are usually
RLOCs.
- ITR, Ingress Tunnel Router: a LISP node at the border of a LISP
site (q.v.) which takes user packets sent to it from inside the
LISP site, encapsulates in a LISP header, and then sends them
across the Internet to an ETR (q.v.); in other words, the start of
a 'tunnel' from the ITR to an ETR.
- ETR: Egress Tunnel Router: a LISP node at the border of a LISP
site (q.v.) which decapsulates user packets which arrive at it
encapsulated in a LISP header, and sends them on towards their
ultimate destination; in other words, the end of the 'tunnel' from
an ITR (q.v.) to the ETR.
- Neighbour ETR: Although an ITR and ETR may be separated by many
actual physical hops, _at the LISP level_, they are direct
neighbours; so any ETR which an ITR sends traffic to is a
'neighbour ETR' of that ITR.
- xTR: An xTR refers to a device which functions both as an ITR and
an ETR (which is typical), when the discussion involves packet
flows in both directions through the device, which results in it
alternately functioning as an ITR and then as an ETR.
- Site: a collection of hosts, routers and networks under a single
administrative control.
- LISP site: A single node, or a set of network elements in an edge
network under the administrative control of a single organization;
they are delimited from the rest of the network by LISP devices
(either separate ITRs and ETRs, or xTRs).
- Reachability, Neighbour ETR Reachability: The ability of an ITR to
be able to send packets to a neighbour ETR (q.v.), or the property
of an ITR to be able to send such packets.
- MR: Map Resolver; a LISP device to which ITRs send requests for
mappings. See Section 6.2.2, "Interface to the Mapping System",
for more.
- MS: Map Server; a LISP device with which ETRs register mappings,
to indicate their availability to handle incoming traffic to the
EIDs covered in those mappings. See Section 6.2.2, "Interface to
the Mapping System" for more.
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- Mapping system: the entire ensemble of data and mechanisms which
allow clients - usually ITRs - to find mapppings (from EIDs to
RLOCs). It includes both the mapping database (q.v), and also
everything used to gain access to it - the MRs, the indexing sub-
system (q.v.), etc. See Section 6.2.1, "Mapping System
Organization" for more.
- Mapping database: the term "mapping database" refers to the entire
collection of {EID->RLOC} mappings spread throughout the LISP
system. It is a subset of the 'mapping system' (q.v.). See
Section 6.2, "The Mapping System", for more.
- Indexing sub-system: the entire ensemble of data and mechanisms
which allows MRs to find out which ETR(s) hold the mappping for a
given EID or EID block. It includes both the data on namespace
delegations, as well as the devices which hold that data, and the
protocols used to interact with those devices. See Section 6.2.1,
"Mapping System Organization" for more.
- DDT node: a node in the (abstract) namespace delegation hierarchy.
- DDT server: an actual machine, which one can send packets to, in
the DDT hierarchy - which is, hopefully, a one-to-one projection
of address delegation hierarchy (although of course a single DDT
node may turn into several sibling servers).
- PITR: Proxy ITR; an ITR which is used for interworking between a
LISP-speaking node or site, and legacy nodes or sites; in general,
it acts like a normal ITR, but does so on behalf of LISP devices
which are receiving packets to a legacy device. See
Section 12.2.1.1, "PITRs", for more.
- PETR: Proxy ETR; an ETR which is used for interworking between a
LISP-speaking node or site, and legacy nodes or sites; in general,
it acts like a normal ETR, but does so on behalf of LISP devices
which are sending packets to a legacy device. See
Section 12.2.1.2, "PETRs" for more.
- RTR: Re-encapsulating Tunnel Router; a data plane 'anchor point'
used by a LISP-speaking device to perform functions that can only
be be performed in the core of the network. One use is for LISP-
speaking device behind a NAT device to send and receive traffic
through the NAT device; see [Improvements], Section "Improved NAT
Support" for more.
- DFZ, Default Free Zone: That part of the Internet in which there
are no 'default' entries in routing tables, but where the routing
tables hold entries for every single reachable destination in the
Internet.
Appendix B. Other Appendices
B.1. A Brief History of Location/Identity Separation
It was only gradually realized in the networking community that
networks (especially large networks) should deal quite separately
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with the identity and location of a node; the distinction between the
two was more than a little hazy at first.
The ARPANET had no real acknowledgment of the difference between the
two. [Heart] [NIC8246] The early Internet also co-mingled the two
([RFC791]), although there was recognition in the early Internet work
that there were two different things going on. [IEN19]
This likely resulted not just from lack of insight, but also the fact
that extra mechanism is needed to support this separation (and in the
early days there were no resources to spare), as well as the lack of
need for it in the smaller networks of the time. (It is a truism of
system design that small systems can get away with doing two things
with one mechanism, in a way that usually will not work when the
system gets much larger.)
The ISO protocol architecture took steps in this direction [NSAP],
but to the Internet community the necessity of a clear separation was
definitively shown by Saltzer. [RFC1498] Later work expanded on
Saltzer's, and tied his separation concepts into the fate-sharing
concepts of Clark. [Clark], [Chiappa]
The separation of location and identity is a step which has recently
been identified by the IRTF as a critically necessary evolutionary
architectural step for the Internet. [RFC6115] However, it has taken
quite some time for this requirement to be generally accepted by the
Internet engineering community at large, although it seems that this
may finally be happening.
Unfortunately, although the development of IPv6 presented a golden
opportunity to learn from this particular failing of IPv4, that
design failed to recognize the need for separation of location and
identity.
B.2. A Brief History of the LISP Project
The LISP system for separation of location and identity resulted from
the discussions of this topic at the Amsterdam IAB Routing and
Addressing Workshop, which took place in October 2006. [RFC4984]
A small group of like-minded personnel from various scattered
locations within Cisco, spontaneously formed immediately after that
workshop, to work on an idea that came out of informal discussions at
the workshop. The first Internet-Draft on LISP appeared in January,
2007, along with a LISP mailing list at the IETF. [LISP0]
Trial implementations started at that time, with initial trial
deployments underway since June 2007; the results of early experience
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have been fed back into the design in a continuous, ongoing process
over several years. LISP at this point represents a moderately
mature system, having undergone a long organic series of changes and
updates.
LISP transitioned from an IRTF activity to an IETF WG in March 2009,
and after numerous revisions, the basic specifications moved to
becoming RFCs at the start of 2013 (although work to expand and
improve it, and find new uses for it, continues, and undoubtly will
for a long time to come).
B.3. Old LISP 'Models'
LISP, as initilly conceived, had a number of potential operating
modes, named 'models'. Although they are now obsolete, one
occasionally sees mention of them, so they are briefly described
here.
- LISP 1: EIDs all appear in the normal routing and forwarding
tables of the network (i.e. they are 'routable');this property is
used to 'bootstrap' operation, by using this to load EID->RLOC
mappings. Packets were sent with the EID as the destination in
the outer wrapper; when an ETR saw such a packet, it would send a
Map-Reply to the source ITR, giving the full mapping.
- LISP 1.5: Similar to LISP 1, but the routability of EIDs happens
on a separate network.
- LISP 2: EIDs are not routable; EID->RLOC mappings are available
from the DNS.
- LISP 3: EIDs are not routable; and have to be looked up in in a
new EID->RLOC mapping database (in the initial concept, a system
using Distributed Hash Tables). Two variants were possible: a
'push' system, in which all mappings were distributed to all ITRs,
and a 'pull' system in which ITRs load the mappings they need, as
needed.
B.4. The ALT Mapping Indexing Sub-system
LISP initially used an indexing sub-system called ALT. [ALT] ALT re-
purposed a number of existing mechanisms to provide an indexing
system, which allowed an experimental LISP initial deployment to
become operational without having to write a lot of code, ALT was
relatively easily constructed from basically unmodified existing
mechanisms; it used BGP running over virtual tunnels using GRE.
ALT proved to have a number of issues which made it unsuitable for
large-scale use, and it has now been superseded by DDT. A complete
list of these is not possible here, but the issues mostly were of two
kinds: technical issues which would have arisen at large scale, and
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practical operational issues which appeared even in the experimental
deployment.
The biggest operational issues was the effort involved in
configuring, and maintain the configuration, of the virtual tunnels
over which ALT ran (including assigning the addresses for the ends,
etc); also, managing the multiple disjoint routing tables required
was difficult and confusing (even for those who were very familiar
with ALT). Debugging faults in ALT was also difficult; and finally,
because of ALT's nature, administrative issues (who pays for what,
who controls what, etc) were problematic.
However, ALT would have had significant technical issues had it been
used at a larger scale.
The most severe (and fundamental) issue was that since all traffic on
the ALT had to transit the 'root' of the ALT tree, those locations
would have become traffic 'hot-spots' in a large scale deployment.
In addition, optimal performance would have required that the ALT
overall topology be restrained to follow the EID namespace
allocation; however, it was not clear that this was feasible. In any
event, even optimal performance was still less than that in
alternatives. The ALT was also very vulnerable to misconfiguration.
See [Jakab] for more about these issues: the basic structure and
operation of DDT is identical to that of TREE, so the conclusions
drawn there about TREE's superiority to ALT apply equally to DDT.
The ALT did have some useful properties which its replacement, DDT,
did not, e.g. the ability to forward data directly to the
destination, over the ALT, when no mapping was available yet for the
destination. However, these were minor, and heavily outweighed by
its problems.
A recent study, [Saucez], measured actual resolution times in the
deployed LISP network during the changeover from ALT to DDT, allowing
direct comparison of the performance of the two systems. The study
took measurements from a variety of locations in the Internet, with
respect to a number of different target EIDs. The results indicate
that the performance was almost identical; there was more variance
with DDT (perhaps due to the effects of caching), but the greatly
improved scalability of DDT as compared to ALT made that effect
acceptable.
B.5. Early NAT Support
The first mechanism used by LISP to support operation through a NAT
device, described here, has now been superseded by the more general
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mechanism proposed in [NAT-Traversal]. That mechanism is, however,
based heavily on this mechanism. The initial mechanism had some
serious limitations, which is why that particular form of it has been
dropped.
First, it only worked with some NATs, those which were configurable
to allow inbound packet traffic to reach a configured host. The NAT
had to be configured to know of the ETR.
Second, since NATs share addresses by using ports, it was only
possible to have a single LISP device behind any given NAT device.
That is because LISP expects all incoming data traffic to be on a
specific port, so it was not possible to have multiple ETRs behind a
single NAT (which normally would have only one global IP address to
share). Even looking at the sort host and port would not necessarily
help, because some source ITR could be sending packets to both ETRs,
so packets to either ETR could also have the identical source host/
port. In short, there was no way for a NAT with multiple ETRs behind
it to know which ETR the packet was for.
To support operation behind a NAT, there was a pair of new LISP
control messages, LISP Echo-Request and Echo-Reply, which allowed the
ETR to discover its temporary global address. The Echo-Request was
sent to the configured Map-Server, and it replied with an Echo-Reply
which included the source address from which the Echo Request was
received (i.e. the public global address assigned to the ETR by the
NAT). The ETR could then insert that address in any Map-Reply
control messages which it sent to correspondent ITRs.
Echo-Request and Echo-Reply have been replaced by Info-Request and
Info-Reply in the replacement, [NAT-Traversal], where they perform
very similar functions; the main change is the addition of the {{xxx
- probably the port, etc to allow multiple XTRs behind a NAT}}.
Author's Address
J. Noel Chiappa
Yorktown Museum of Asian Art
Yorktown, Virginia
USA
EMail: jnc@mit.edu
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