[lir-wg] RE: [ipv6-wg at ripe.net] Discussion about RIPE-261

Gert,


> Gert Doering wrote:
> - The /23 allocations ICANN -> RIRs are bad, because they lead to
>   address space fragmentation, and the blocks are too small to do
useful
>   allocation towards the LIRs. Something NEEDS to be changed here.

Agree.


> So my personal recommendation would be:
> - change the /23 allocation boundary ICANN -> RIR to something more
>   useful, like a /12 or so (a /12 means "512 of them are available,
>   so we're not yet burning bridges - but a /8 would work as well.
>   A /16 is already somewhat tight).

I don't find this very flexible. If you look at what happened with
LACNIC, countries from ARIN were transferred to LACNIC. I expect that
when AFRINIC is activated, countries from both RIPE and ARIN will be
transferred to AFRINIC.

I agree with this goal:

> - As a technical reason: people want to be able to filter IPv6
>   prefixes by region, like "I only have one uplink that provides me
>   with US connectivity, so there's no need to carry any US prefixes
>   in my routing table, I just point a summary down that line".

If you want to do this, you might as well do it right in the first
place. IMHO, delegating space to a RIR as a single block is a mistake.
It would be much more flexible to assign space to countries, and simply
say that RIRs have stewardship of the space assigned to countries
belonging to them. If a country changes RIRs like we have seen for
LACNIC and like we will likely see for AFRINIC, no change in addresses
and the geographical summary is preserved.

Below is an example interpolated from the work we have done on
geographic assignments:
http://arneill-py.sacramento.ca.us/ipv6mh/geov6.txt

Quick notes:
- We are presently talking about PA space; the document mentioned above
refers to PI space. However the geographic cutoff collapsed to the
country level would not change.

- I chose to assign a /8 to the entire world, which can be discussed.
This means that after we colonize 255 other planets we have a problem
:-) can someone help me with that warp drive please?

- What could also be discussed are the details of how this was
generated, but I would like to get the _concept_ across then we can talk
about the details.

Zone              Population  %G Pop.  IANA
----------------  ----------  -------  --------------
China             1284971000   20.91%  2346:0000::/11
Continental Asia   673454413   10.96%  2346:2000::/11
India             1025096000   16.68%  2346:4000::/12
Northern Africa    565854163    9.21%  2346:5000::/12
Asian Islands      488468000    7.95%  2346:6000::/12
Western Europe     423412058    6.89%  2346:7000::/12
North America      318243350    5.18%  2346:8000::/12
South America      350724557    5.71%  2346:9000::/13
Eastern Europe     307858000    5.01%  2346:9800::/13
Middle East        258577000    4.21%  2346:A000::/13
Southern Africa    242566332    3.95%  2346:A800::/13
Central America    175719760    2.86%  2346:B000::/14
Oceania             30568053    0.50%  2346:B400::/16
----------------  ----------  -------  --------------
World             6145512686  100.00%  2346:0000::/8


Example of one zone:

Country              Population  %Z Pop.  %G Pop.  IANA
-------------------  ----------  -------  -------  --------------
United States         285926000   89.85%    4.65%  2346:8000::/13
Canada                  1015000    9.75%    0.50%  2346:8800::/17
Hawaii                  1224398    0.38%    0.02%  2346:8880::/21
Bermuda                   60000    0.02%    0.00%  2346:8888::/24
Greenland                 12483    0.00%    0.00%  2346:8889::/24
-------------------- ----------  -------  -------  --------------
Zone: North America   318243350  100.00%    5.18%  2346:8000::/12

Implementing such a system would change the way large(global) LIRs
request space from RIRs. As of today, they would typically request one
/32 per RIR. For people the size of Sprint, they would then have to
request a /32 per country they service and assign space to customers
from the correct prefix.

What this means to large LIRs is a large initial number of prefixes, but
it's not fundamentally worse than an always-growing number of /32s when
IPv6 finally takes off IMHO.

For smaller LIRs that service only one country, there would be no
change.

There would be some impact on the GRT as there would be a "SPRINT-USA"
block, an "ATT-USA" block, a "SPRINT-GERMANY" block, an "ATT-GERMANY"
block, etc. In other words, what we are looking at is one /32 prefix per
country per large LIR, opposed to as many /32s a large LIR would need in
the long run anyway.

Comments welcome.


> - inside that RIR allocation, use the binary chop algorithm
>   described in RIPE-261 for the RIR->LIR distribution.

I'm not familiar with this; would that be something like RFC3531?

Michel.