Re: Changes to PI Policy?

[Peter Gradwell <]

At 15:53 17/04/2003 +0100, Denesh Bhabuta wrote:
> erm, want to come up with some ideas rather than making 
> blanket 'management type' statements such as 'fix this and I don't care how'?
Sure... I was just out for most of the day yesterday. I 
made the blanket statement because it's the user's point of 
view (and it's my point of view as a user). I want to help 
the group stay away from making policy in a vacuum.

>  The PI Task force was set up for exchange of ideas to 
> 'fix' the issue. It would be useful for you to look at 
> the history of this, and look at past documents and the 
> LIR-WG mailing list. Look at the real world constraints - 
> and then tell us what you think is the best way forward.
I accept that the amount of memory you can fit in a router 
is finite and that the number of routers an ISP can afford 
is also finite. I also accept that if we make a BGP mesh 
more complicated then the problem of determine the best 
route will become computationally impossible to compute.

However, the number of items we want to connect to this 
network and thus the number of addresses we are going to 
need is (a) not going to reduce and (b) is not finite.

Having thought about this issue before in some detail (I 
wrote an application to do a PhD on the subject, but 
discovered i didn't like the supervisor) I think that 
actually the issue of enormous routing tables is a very 
hard issue and it is not sufficently well addressed by the 
current hardware, software and logic we are employing. I 
think that finding a good solution should be the subject of 
some long and well thought out research, perhaps using 
markets (trade for the best route and forget about the 
rest), or some type of route caching (so you don't have to 
know about the whole route).

anyway... what I'm saying is that I don't think we can 
solve the issue here & now in this WG and I don't think the 
solution is for RIPE to outlaw PI space because it's 
inconvenient. I think the solution is to make everything 
Provider Independent and solve the large scale routeing table problem

However... like I just said, I don't think we can do that today.

So, my first (serious) suggestion is that RIPE (perhaps 
with ARIN, IETF, APNIC, etc.) sponsor some Chairs in a few 
Maths & Computer Science departments round the world to 
reduce the deficiency in the number of academics looking at 
routing problems. (For example, there is one bloke in the 
UK, Dr Ian Pratt, who had one research student, richard 
morttimer, who has now gone onto other things, who know 
vaguely anything about BGP and/or who are doing anything 
with it. OTOH, there are loads of brilliant mathematicians 
and computer scientists all over the place that would quite 
happily produce some good solutions to the bigger problem.

So, having got the whole blue sky / dreamboat / next-gen 
stuff out of the way, my second (serious) suggestion is 
that RIPE applies a "quick fix". I suggest that:

Obviously, if nothing smaller than a /24 will not be routed 
then there is little point in allocating it. (If some one 
applies for a /24 PI space because they got turned down on 
a PA request, we have to wonder why the PA request was denied).

- Do we know what the actual impact on the routing table 
would be if we permitted smaller allocations from the PI address blocks?

any way. I shall have to continue this long train of thought after the weekend.

peter

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