IPv7 - Summary of Current Proposals

[dixon@localhost (Tim Dixon)]

The attached document is distributed as promised during RIPE Meeting 14.

Tim


                                                        RTC(93)004
                                                        18th January 1993
                                                        Tim Dixon

        
                COMPARISON OF PROPOSALS FOR IP VERSION 7



The following is a brief summary of the characteristics of the three
main proposals for replacing the current Internet Protocol. It is not
intended to be exhaustive or definitive (a brief bibliography at the end
points to sources of more information), but to serve as input to the
European discussions on these proposals, to be co-ordinated by RARE and
RIPE. It should be recognised that the proposals are themselves "moving
targets", and in so far as this paper is accurate at all, it reflects
the position at the 25th IETF meeting in Washington, DC. Comments from
Ross Callon and Paul Tsuchiya on the original draft have been
incorporated.

The paper begins with a "generic" discussion of the mechanisms for
solving problems and achieving particular goals, before discussing the
proposals invidually.

1. WHY IS THE CURRENT IP INADEQUATE?

The problem has been investigated and formulated by the ROAD group, but
briefly reduces to the following:

-       Exhaustion of IP Class B Address Space

-       Exhaustion of IP Address Space in General

-       Non-hierarchical nature of address allocation leading to flat
routing space

Although the IESG requirements for a new Internet Protocol go further
than simply routing and addressing issues,  it is these issues that make
extension of the current protocol an impractical option. Consequently,
most of the discussion and development of the various proposed protocols
has concentrated on these specific problems.

Near term remedies for these problems include the CIDR proposals (which
permit the aggregation of Class C networks for routing purposes) and
assignment policies which will allocate Class C network numbers in a
fashion which CIDR can take advantage of. Routing protocols supporting
CIDR are OSPF and BGP4. None of these are pre-requisites for the new IP
(IPv7), but are necessary to prolong the life of the current Internet
long enough to work on longer-term solutions. Ross Callon points out
that there are other options for prolonging the life of IP and that some
ideas have been distributed on the TUBA list.

Longer term proposals are being sought which ultimately allow for
further growth of the Internet. The timescale for considering these
proposals is as follows:

-       Dec 15  Issue selection criteria as RFC

-       Feb 12  Two interoperable implementations available

-       Feb 26  Second draft of proposal documents available

The (ambitious) target is for a decision to be made at the 26th IETF
(Columbus, Ohio in March 1993) on which proposals to pursue.

The current likely candidates for selection are:

-       PIP ('P' Internet Protocol -  an entirely new protocol

-       TUBA (TCP/UDP with Big Addresses - uses ISO CLNP)

-       SIP (Simple IP - IP with larger addresses and fewer options)

There is a further proposal from Robert Ullman of which I don't claim to
have much knowledge. Associated with each of the candidates are
transition plans, but these are largely independent of the protocol
itself and contain elements which could be adopted separately, even with
IP v4, to further extend the life of current implementations and
systems.

2. WHAT THE PROPOSALS HAVE IN COMMON

2.1 Larger Addresses

All the proposals (of course) make provision for larger address fields
which not only increase the number of addressable systems, but also
permit the hierarchical allocation of addresses to facilitate route
aggregation.

2.2 Philosophy

The proposals also originate from a "routing implementation" view of the
world - that is to say they focus on the internals of routing within the
network and do not primarily look at the network service seen by the
end-user, or by applications. This is perhaps inevitable, especially
given the tight time constraints for producing interoperable
implementations. However, the (few) representatives of real users at the
25th IETF, the people whose support is ultimately necessary to deploy
new host implementations, were distinctly unhappy.

There is an inbuilt assumption in the proposals that IPv7 is  intended
to be a universal protocol: that is, that the same network-layer
protocol will be used between hosts on the same LAN, between hosts and
routers, between routers in the same domain, and between routers in
different domains. There are some advantages in defining separate
"access" and "long-haul" protocols, and this is not precluded by the
requirements. However, despite the few opportunities for major change of
this sort within the Internet, the need for speed of development and low
risk have led to the proposals being incremental, rather than radical,
changes to well-proven existing technology.

There is a further unstated assumption that the architecture is targeted
at the singly-connected host. It is currently difficult to design IPv4
networks which permit hosts with more than one interface to benefit from
increased bandwidth and reliability compared with singly-connected hosts
(a consequence of the address belonging to the interface and not the
host). It would be preferable if topological constraints such as these
were documented. It has been asserted that this is not necessarily a
constraint of either the PIP or TUBA proposals, but I believe it is an
issue that has not emerged so far amongst the comparative criteria.

2.3 Source Routing

The existing IPv4 has provision for source-specified routes, though this
is little used [would someone like to contradict me here?], partly
because it requires knowledge of the internal structure of the network
down to the router level. Source routes are usually required by users
when there are policy requirements which make it preferable or
imperative that traffic between a source and destination should pass
through particular administrative domains. Source routes can also be
used by routers within administrative domains to route via particular
logical topologies. Source-specified routing requires a number of
distinct components:

a.      The specification by the source of the policy by which the route
should be selected

b.      The selection of a route appropriate to the policy

c.      Marking traffic with the identified route

d.      Routing marked traffic accordingly

These steps are not wholly independent. The way in which routes are
identified in step (c) may constrain the kinds of route which can be
selected in previous steps. The destination, inevitably, participates in
the specification of source routes either by advertising the policies it
is prepared to accept or, conceivably, by a negotiation process.

All of the proposals mark source routes by adding a chain of (perhaps
partially-specified) intermediate addresses to each packet. None
specifies the process by which a host might acquire the information
needed to  specify these intermediate addresses [not entirely
unreasonably at this stage, but further information is expected]. The
negative consequences of these decisions are:

-       Packet headers can become quite long, depending on the number of
intermediate addresses that must be specified (although there are
mechanisms which are currently specified or which can be imagined to
specify only the significant portions of intermediate addresses)

-       The source route may have to be re-specified periodically if
particular intermediate addresses are no longer reachable

The positive consequences are:

-       Inter-domain routers do not have to understand policies, they
simply have to mechanically follow the source route

-       Routers do not have to store context identifying routes, since
the information is specified in each packet header

-       Route servers can be located anywhere in the network, provided
the hosts know how to find them.

2.4 Encapsulation

Encapsulation is the ability to enclose a network-layer packet within
another one so that the actual packet can be directed via a path it
would not otherwise take to a router that can remove the outermost
packet and direct the resultant packet to its destination. Encapsulation
requires:

a.      An indication in the packet that it contains another packet

b.      A function in routers which, on receiving such a packet, removes
the encapsulation and re-enters the forwarding process

All the proposals support encapsulation. Note that it is possible to
achieve the effect of source routing by suitable encapsulation by the
source.

2.5 Multicast

The specification of addresses to permit multicast with various scopes
can be accomodated by all the proposals. Internet-wide multicast is, of
course, for further study!

2.6 Fragmentation

All the proposals support the fragmentation of packets by intermediate
routers, though there has been some recent discussion of removing this
mechanism from some of the proposals and requiring the use of an
MTU-discovery process to avoid the need for fragmentation. Such a
decision would effectively preclude the use of transport protocols which
use message-count sequence numbering (such as OSI Transport) over the
network, as only protocols with byte-count acknowledgement (such as TCP)
can deal with MTU reductions during the lifetime of a connection. OSI
Transport may not be particularly relevant to the IP community (though
it may be of relevance to commercial suppliers providing multiprotocol
services), however the consequences for the types of services which may
be supported over IPv7 should be noted.

2.7 The End of Lifetime as We Know It

The old IPv4 "Time to Live" field has been recast in every case as a
simple hop count, largely on grounds of implementation convenience.
Although the old TTL was largely implemented in this fashion anyway, it
did serve an architectural purpose in putting an upper bound on the
lifetime of a packet in the network. If this field is recast as a
hop-count, there must be some other specification of the maximum
lifetime of a packet in the network so that a source host can ensure
that network-layer fragment ids and transport-layer sequence numbers are
never in danger of re-use whilst there is a danger of confusion. There
are, in fact, three separate issues here:

1       Terminating routing loops (solved by hop count) 
2       Bounding lifetime of network-layer packets (a necessity, 
        unspecified so far) to support assumptions by the transport layer 
3       Permitting the source to place further restrictions on packet 
        lifetime (for example so that "old" real-time traffic can be 
        discarded in favour of new traffic in the case
        of congestion (an optional feature, unspecified so far)

3. WHAT THE PROPOSALS ONLY HINT AT

3.1 Resource Reservation

Increasingly, applications require a certain bandwidth or transit delay
if they are to be at all useful (for example, real-time video and audio
transport). Such applications need procedures to indicate their
requirements to the network and to have the required resources reserved.
This process is in some ways analogous to the selection of a source
route:

a.      The specification by the source of its requirements

b.      The confirmation that the requirements can be met

c.      Marking traffic with the requirement

d.      Routing marked traffic accordingly

Traffic which is routed according to the same set of resource
requirements is sometimes called a "flow". The identification of flows
requires a setup process, and it is tempting to suppose that the same
process might also be used to set up source routes, however, there are a
number of differences:

-       All the routers on a path must participate in resource
reservation and agree to it

-       Consequently, it is relatively straightforward to maintain
context in each router and the identification for flows can be short

-       The network can choose to reroute on failure

By various means, each proposal could carry flow-identification, though
this is very much "for future study" at present. No setup mechansisms
are defined. The process for actually reserving the resources is a
higher-order problem. The interaction between source-routing and
resource reservation needs further investigation: although the two are
distinct and have different implementation constraints, the consequence
of having two different mechanisms could be that it becomes difficult to
select routes which meet both policy and performance goals.

3.2 Address-Assignment Policies

In IPv4, addresses were bound to systems on a long-term basis and in
many cases could be used interchangeably with DNS names. It is tacitly
accepted that the association of an address with a particular system may
be more volatile in IPv7. Indeed, one of the proposals, PIP, makes a
distinction between the identification of a system (a fixed quantity)
and its address, and permits the binding to be altered on the fly. None
of the proposals defines bounds for the lifetime of addresses, and the
manner in which addresses are assigned is not necessarily bound to a
particular proposal. For example, within the larger address space to be
provided by IPv7, there is a choice to be made of assigning the "higher
order" part of the hierarchical address in a geographically-related
fashion or by reference to service provider. Geographically-based
addresses can be constant and easy to assign, but represent a renewed
danger of degeneration to "flat" addresses within the region of
assignment, unless certain topological restrictions are assumed.
Provider-based address assignment results in a change of address (if
providers are changed) or multiple addresses (if multiple providers are
used). Mobile hosts (depending on the underlying technology) can present
problems in both geographic and provider-based schemes.

Without firm proposals for address-assignment schemes and the
consequences for likely address lifetimes, it is impossible to assume
that the existing DNS model by which name-to-address bindings can be
discovered remains valid.

Note that their in an interaction between the mechanism for assignment
of addresses and way in which automatic configuration may be deployed.

3.3 Automatic Configuration

Amongst the biggest (user) bugbears of current IP services is the
administrative effort of maintaining basic configuration information,
such as assigning names and addresses to hosts, ensuring these are
refelected in the DNS, and keeping this information correct. Part of
this results from poor implementation (or the blind belief that vi and
awk are network management tools). However, a lot of the problems could
be alleviated by making this process more automatic. Some of the
possibilities (some mutually-exlusive) are:

-       Assigning host addresses from some (relative) invariant, such as
a LAN address

-       Defining a protocol for dynamic assignment of addresses within a
subnetwork

-       Defining "generic addresses" by which hosts can without
preconfiguration reach necessary local servers (DNS, route servers,
etc).

-       Have hosts determine their name by DNS lookup

-       Have hosts update their name/address bindings when their
configuration changes

Whilst a number of the proposals make mention of some of these
possibilities, the choice of appropriate solutions depends to some
extent on address-assignment policies. Also, dynamic configuration
results in some difficult philosopical and practical issues (what
exactly is the role of an address?, In what sense is a host "the same
host" when its address changes?, How do you handle dynamic changes to
DNS mappings and how do you authenticate them?).

The groups involved in the proposals would, I think, see most of these
questions outside their scope. It would seem to be a failure in the
process of defining and selecting candidates for IPv7 that "systemness"
issues like these will probably not be much discussed. This is
recognised by the participants, and it is likely that, even when a
decision is made, some of these ideas will be revisited by a wider
audience.

It is, however, unlikely that IP will make an impact on proprietary
networking systems for the non-technical environment (e.g. Netware,
Appletalk), without automatic configuration being taken seriously either
in the architecture, or by suppliers. I believe that there are ideas on
people's heads of how to address these issues - they simply have not
made it onto paper yet.

3.4 Application Interface/Application Protocol Changes

A number of common application protocols (FTP, RPC etc) have been
identified which specifically transfer 32-bit IPv4 addresses, and there
are doubtless others, both standard and proprietary. There are also many
applications which treat IPv4 addresses as simple 32-bit integers. Even
applications which use BSD sockets and try to handle addresses opaquely
will not understand how to parse or print longer addresses (even if the
socket structure is big enough to accommodate them).

Each proposal, therefore, needs to specify mechanisms to permit existing
applications and interfaces to operate in the new environment whilst
conversion takes place. It would be useful also, to have (one)
specification of a reference programming interface for (TCP and) IPv7
(which would also operate on IPv4), to allow developers to begin
changing applications now. All the proposals specify transition
mechansisms from which existing application-compatibility can be
inferred. There is no sign yet of a new interface specification
independent of chosen protocol.

3.5 DNS Changes

It is obvious that there has to be a name to address mapping service
which supports the new, longer, addresses. All the proposals assume that
this service will be provided by DNS, with some suitably-defined new
resource record. There is some discussion ongoing about the
appropriateness of returning this information along with "A" record
information in response to certain enquiries, and which information
should be requested first. There is a potential tradeoff between the
number of queries needed to establish the correct address to use and the
potential for breaking existing implementations by returning information
that they do not expect.

There has been heat, but not light, generated by discussion of  the use
of DNS for auto-configuration and the scaling (or otherwise) of reverse
translations for certain addressing schemes.

4. WHAT THE PROPOSALS DON'T REALLY MENTION

4.1 Congestion Avoidance

IPv4 offers "Source Quench" control messages which may be used by
routers to indicate to a source that it is congested and has or may
shortly drop packets. TUBA/PIP have a "congestion encountered" bit which
provides similar information to the destination. None of these
specifications offers detailed instructions on how to use these
facilities. However, there has been a substantial body of analysis over
recent years that suggests that such facilities can be used (by
providing information to the transport protocol) not only to signal
congestion, but also to minimise delay through the network layer. Each
proposal can offer some form of congestion  signalling, but none
specifies a mechanism for its use (or an analysis of whether the
mechanism is in fact useful).

As a user of a network service which currently has a discard rate of
around 30% and a round-trip-time of up to 2 seconds for a distance of
only 500 miles I would be most interested in some proposals for a more
graceful degradation of the network service under excess load.

4.2 Mobile Hosts

A characteristic of mobile hosts is that they (relatively) rapidly move
their physical location and point of attachment to the network topology.
This obviously has signficance for addressing (whether geographical or
topological) and routing. There seems to be an understanding of the
problem, but so far no detailed specification of a solution.

4.3 Accounting

The IESG selection criteria require only that proposals do not have the
effect of preventing the collection of information that may be of
interest for audit or billing purposes. Consequently, none of the
proposals  consider potential accounting mechanisms.

4.4 Security

"Network Layer Security Issues are For Further Study". Or secret.

However, it would be useful to have it demonstrated that each candidate
could be extended to provide a level of security, for example against
address-spoofing. This will be particularly  important if
resource-allocation features will permit certain hosts to claim large
chunks of available bandwidth for specialised applications.

Note that providing some level of security implies manual configuration
of security information within the network and must be considered in
relationship to auto-configuration goals.

5. WHAT MAKES THE PROPOSALS DIFFERENT?

Each proposal is about as different to the others as it is to IPv4 -
that is the differences are small in principle, but may have significant
effects (extending the size of addresses is only a small difference in
principle!). The main distinct characteristics are:

PIP:

PIP has an innovative header format that facilitates hierarchical,
policy and virtual-circuit routing. It also has "opaque" fields in the
header whose semantics can be defined differently in different
administrative domains and whose use and translation can be negotiated
across domain boundaries. No control protocol is yet specified.

SIP:

SIP offers a "minimalist" approach - removing all little-used fields
from the IPv4 header and extending the size of addresses to (only) 64
bits. The control protocol is based on modifications to ICMP. This
proposal has the advantages of processing efficiency and familiarity.

TUBA:

TUBA is based on CLNP (ISO 8473) and the ES-IS (ISO 9542) control
protocol. TUBA provides for the operation of TCP transport and UDP over
a CLNP network. The main arguments in favour of TUBA are that routers
already exist which can handle the network-layer protocol, that the
extensible addresses offer a wide margin of "future-proofing" and that
there is an opportunity for convergence of standards and products.

5.1 PIP

PIP packet headers contain a set of instructions to the router's
forwarding processor to perform certain actions on the packet. In
traditional protocols, the contents of certain fields imply certain
actions; PIP gives the source the flexibility to write small "programs"
which direct the routing of packets through the network.

PIP addresses have an effectively unlimited length: each level in the
topological hierarchy of the network contributes part of the address and
addresses change as the network topology changes. In a completely
hierarchical network topology, the amount of routing information
required at each level could be very small. However, in practice, levels
of hierarchy will be determined more by commercial and practical factors
than by the constraints of any particular routing protocol. A greater
advantage is that higher-order parts of the address may be omitted in
local exchanges and that lower-order parts may be omitted in source
routes, reducing the amount of topological information that host systems
are required to know.

There is an assumption that PIP addresses are liable to change, so a
further quantity, the PIP ID, is assigned to systems for the purposes of
identification. It isn't clear that this quantity has any purpose which
could not equally be served by a DNS name [it is more compact, but
equally it does not need to be carried in every packet and requires an
additional lookup]. However, the problem does arise of how two
potentially-communicating host systems find the correct addresses to
use.

The most complex part of PIP is that the meaning of some of the header
fields is determined by mutual agreement within a particular domain. The
semantics of specific processing facilities (for example, queuing
priority) are registered globally, but the actual use and encoding of
requests for these facilities in the packet header can be different in
different domains. Border routers between two domains which use
different encodings must map  from one encoding to another. Since
routers may not only be adjacent physically to other domains, but also
via "tunnels", the number of different encoding rules a router may need
to understand is potentially quite large. Although there is a saving in
header space by using such a scheme as opposed to the more familiar
"options", the cost in the complexity of negotiating the use and
encoding of these facilities, together with re-coding the packets at
each domain border, is a subject of some concern. Although it may be
possible for hosts to "precompile" the encoding rules for their local
domain, there are many potential implementaion difficulties.

Although PIP offers the most flexibility of the three proposals, more
work needs to be done on "likely use" scenarios which make the potential
advantages and disadvantages more concrete.

5.2 SIP

SIP is simply IP with larger addresses and fewer options. Its main
advantage is that it is even simpler that IPv4 to process. Its main
disadvantages are:

-       It is far from clear that, if 32 bits of address are
insufficient, 64 will be enough for the forseeable future;

-       although there are a few "reserved" bits in the header, the
extension of SIP to support new features is not obvious.

There's really very little else to say!

5.3 TUBA

The characteristics of ISO CLNS are reasonably well known: the protocol
bears a strong cultural resemblance to IPv4, though with 20-byte
network-layer addressing. Apart from a spurious "Not Invented Here"
prejudice, the main argument againt TUBA is that it is rather too like
IPv4, offering nothing other than larger, more flexible, addresses.
There is proof-by-example that routers are capable of handling the
(very) long addresses efficiently, rather less that the longer headers
do not adversely impact network bandwidth.

There are a number of objections to the proposed control protocol (ISO
9542):

-       My early experience is that the process by which routers
discover hosts is inefficient and resource consuming for routers - and
requires quite fine timer resolution on hosts - if large LANs are to be
accomodated reasonably. Proponents of TUBA suggest that recent
experience suggests that ARP is no better, but I think this issue needs
examination.

-       The "redirect" mechanism is based on (effectively) LAN addreses
and not network addresses, meaning that local routers can only
"hand-off" complex routing decisions to other routers on the same LAN.
Equally, redirection schemes (such as that of IPv4) which redirect to
network addresses can result in unnecessary extra hops. Analysis of
which solution is better is rather dependent on the scenarios which are
constructed.

To be fair, however, the part of the protocol which provides for
router-discovery provides a mechanism, absent from other proposals, by
which hosts can locate nearby gateways and potentially automatically
configure their addresses.

6. Transition Plans

It should be obvious that a transition which permits "old" hosts to talk
to "new" hosts requires:

Either:

(a)     That IPv7 hosts can also use IPv4 or (b)        There is
translation by an intermediate system

and either:

(c)     The infrastructure between systems is capable of carrying both
IPv7 and IPv4 or (d)    Tunneling or translation is used to carry one
protocol within another in parts of the network

The transition plans espoused by the various proposals are simply
different combinations of the above. Experience would tend to show that
all these things will in fact happen, regardless of which protocol is
chosen.

One problem of the tunneling/translation process is that there is
additional information (the extra address parts) which must be carried
across IPv4 tunnels in the network. This can either be carried by adding
an extra "header" to the data before encapsulation in the IPv4 packet,
or by encoding the information as new IPv4 option types. In the former
case, it may be difficult to map error messages correctly, since the
original packet is truncated before return; in the latter case there is
a danger of the packet being discarded (IPv4 options are not
self-describing and new ones may not pass through IPv4 routers). There
is thus the possibility of having to introduce a "new" version of IPv4
in order to support IPv7 tunneling.

The alternative (in which IPv7 hosts have two stacks and the
infrastructure may or may not support IPv7 or IPv4) of course requires a
mechanism for resolving which protocols to try.

7. Random Comments

This is the first fundamental change in the Internet protocols that has
occurred since the Internet was manageable as an entity and its
development was tied to US government contracts. It was perhaps
inevitable that the IETF/IESG/IAB structure would not have evolved to
manage a change of this magnitude and it is to be hoped that the new
structures that are proposed will be more successful in promoting a
(useful) consensus. It is interesting to see that many of the perceived
problems of the OSI process (slow progress, factional infighting over
trivia, convergence on the lowest-common denominator solution, lack of
consideration for the end-user) are in danger of attaching themselves to
IPv7 and it will be interesting to see to what extent these difficulties
are an inevitable consequence of wide representation and participation
in network design.

It could be regarded either as a sign of success or failure of the
competitive process for the selection of IPv7 that the three main
proposals  have few really significant differences. In this respect, the
result of the selection process is not of particular significance, but
the process itself is perhaps necessary to repair the social and
technical cohesion of the Internet Engineering process.

8. Further Information

The main discussion lists for the proposals listed are:

        TUBA:           tuba@localhost
        PIP:            pip@localhost
        SIP:            sip@localhost
        General:        big-internet@localhost

        (Requests to: <list name>-request@localhosthost>)

Internet Drafts and RFCs for the various proposals can be found in the
usual places:

Callon, R.      TCP and UDP with Bigger Addresses (TUBA),  A Simple
Proposal for Internet Addressing and Routing

        rfc/rfc1347.txt

Piscitello, D.  Use of ISO CLNP in TUBA Environments
 
        internet-drafts/draft-piscitello-clnp-00.txt
 
Callon, R.      Addressing and End Point Identification, For Use with
TUBA
 
        internet-drafts/draft-ietf-tuba-address-00.txt, .ps

Tsuchiya, P.    Pip: The `P' Internet Protocol

        internet-drafts/draft-tsuchiya-pip-00.txt
 
Tsuchiya, P.    Pip Overview and Examples

        internet-drafts/draft-tsuchiya-pip-overview-01.txt
 
Tsuchiya, P.    Pip Header Processing

        internet-drafts/draft-ietf-pip-processing-00.txt
 
Tsuchiya, P.    Pip Objects

        internet-drafts/draft-ietf-pip-objects-00.txt
 
Tsuchiya, P.    Pip Identifiers

        internet-drafts/draft-ietf-pip-identifiers-00.txt
 
 
Deering, S.     A Simple Internet Protocol
 
        parcftp.xerox.com:pub/net-research/sip-spec