Concluded WG Interface to the Routing System (i2rs)

Note: The data for concluded WGs is occasionally incorrect.

WG Name Interface to the Routing System
Acronym i2rs
Area Routing Area (rtg)
State Concluded
Charter charter-ietf-i2rs-02 Approved
Document dependencies
Additional resources I2RS Wiki, Issue tracker
Personnel Chairs Russ White, Susan Hares
Area Director Martin Vigoureux
Liaison Contacts Jeffrey Haas, Susan Hares
Mailing list Address [email protected]
To subscribe https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/i2rs
Archive https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/browse/i2rs/

Final Charter for Working Group

In an IP routed network, the routing system:

  • Distributes topology and other state (network metadata)
  • Uses this network metadata to determine the best paths to each given
    reachable destination attached to the network
  • Communicates these decisions to the forwarding plane of each
    forwarding device in the network.

That is, the routing system is the collection of entities, protocols and
processes that collectively build the forwarding tables that are
exported into the entities that constitute the network's forwarding
plane.

While processes participating in the routing system are often colocated
with the local forwarding elements, this isn't a necessary condition.
Thus, the routing system includes control plane protocols and processes
that compute routes and paths for data packets, wherever the processes
implementing those protocols and processes may be running.

I2RS facilitates real-time or event driven interaction with the routing
system through a collection of protocol-based control or management
interfaces. These allow information, policies, and operational
parameters to be injected into and retrieved (as read or by
notification) from the routing system while retaining data consistency
and coherency across the routers and routing infrastructure, and among
multiple interactions with the routing system. The I2RS interfaces will
co-exist with existing configuration and management systems and
interfaces.

It is envisioned that users of the I2RS interfaces will be management
applications, network controllers, and user applications that make
specific demands on the network.

The I2RS working group works to develop a high-level architecture that
describes the basic building-blocks necessary to enable the specific use
cases, and that will lead to an understanding of the abstract
informational models and requirements for encodings and protocols for the I2RS interfaces. Small and well-scoped use cases are critical to
constrain the scope of the work and achieve sufficient focus for the
working group to deliver successful outcomes. Initial work within the
working group will be limited to a single administrative domain.

The working group is chartered to work on the following items:

  • High-level architecture for I2RS including considerations of policy
    and security.

  • Tightly scoped key use cases for operational use of I2RS as follows:
    o Interactions with the Routing Information Base (RIB). Allowing read
    and write access to the RIB, but no direct access to the Forwarding
    Information Base (FIB).
    o Filter-based RIBs include a match of fields in IP header plus other
    IP packet format fields. The matches in the filter-based RIBs may be
    ordered to allow appropriate sequencing of the filter. Each match
    contains an action which may be forwarding to a next hop address or
    other actions. I2RS will coordinate this work with appropriate
    working groups in routing, security and operations & management
    areas.
    o Control and analysis of the operation of the Border Gateway Protocol
    (BGP) including the setting and activation of policies related to
    the protocol.
    o Control, optimization, and choice of traffic exit points from
    networks based on more information than provided by the dynamic
    control plane.
    o Distributed reaction to network-based attacks through rapid
    modification of the control plane behavior to reroute traffic for
    one destination while leaving standard mechanisms (filters, metrics,
    and policy) in place for other routes.
    o Service layer routing to improve on existing hub-and-spoke traffic.
    o The ability to extract information about topology from the network.
    Injection and creation of topology will not be considered as a work
    item. Such topology-related models will be based on a generic
    topology model to support multiple uses; the generic topology model
    should support topology extension for non-I2RS uses.
    o Other use cases may be adopted by the working group only through
    rechartering.

  • Yang Data Models consistent with the use cases. Such documents
    should include an information overview. The existing WG draft -
    draft-ietf-i2rs-rib-info-model - that is just an informational model
    can be completed or extended with the associated YANG data model.

  • Requirements for I2RS protocols and encoding languages.

  • An analysis of existing IETF and other protocols and encoding
    languages against the requirements.

Milestones

Date Milestone Associated documents
Dec 2016 Request Publication of Protocol Independent Topology Data Models
Dec 2016 Request publication of an Informational document defining encoding language requirements
Nov 2016 Request publication of an Informational document providing an analysis of existing IETF and other protocols and encoding languages against the requirements
Oct 2016 Consider re-chartering
Sep 2016 Request Publication of Protocol Independent RIB Data Model
Sep 2016 Request publication of Informational documents describing use cases
Aug 2016 Request publication of Standards Track documents specifying information models
Aug 2016 Request publication of an Informational document defining the protocol requirements
Mar 2016 Request Publication of Filter-Based RIB Data Model

Done milestones

Date Milestone Associated documents
Done Working Group adoption of Filter-Based RIB Yang Data Model

Rfc7921 milestones

Date Milestone Associated documents
Rfc7921 Request publication of an Informational document defining the high-level architecture
Rfc7921 Request publication of an Informational document defining the problem statement