A New Addressing and Forwarding Architecture for the Internet

Abstract

The current Internet routing and addressing architecture is facing a serious scalability problem. The default free zone (DFZ) routing table size grows at an increasing and potentially alarming rate. The Internet architecture uses a single namespace - the IP address, to express two functions about a network entity: its identifier and locator. This overloading of semantics leads to the scalability problem as a consequence of multihoming, traffic engineering, and nonaggregatable address allocations. The current Internet architecture does not inherently support emerging features such as mobility either.

This thesis presents a simple addressing and forwarding architecture (SAFA) for the Internet. SAFA separates the locator namespace from the ID namespace so that the locators can follow the hierarchies in the Internet topology and be aggregated. The locators are allocated dynamically and automatically. The hierarchical format of locators gives end systems more control over the route selection. A straightforward forwarding scheme is designed based on the hierarchical addressing scheme. The meshed part of the Internet topology is integrated into the forwarding procedure through a special forwarding table. With a rendezvous service that maps from IDs to locators, SAFA also provides scalable support for mobility, multihoming and traffic engineering. Our work also includes an Internet topology study and a prototype implementation of the architecture. The evaluation results suggest that SAFA would be feasible in the current Internet if deployed.