You could start by looking at MANET work, both in the WG of that
name and work outside the IETF under that name and as ad hoc
networks (the mobile in MANET can be misleading, D for dynamic
might be mor to the point) and mesh networks. There are real
networks (such as the Freifunk network in Germany) that do some
of what you are talking about, and use protocols based on IETF
work. (Freifunk uses OLSR - RFC 3626 - and intends, as I
understand, to use OLSRv2, once we manage to finish it.)
Note: I'm an author of OLSRv2, but have no connection to
Freifunk.
There are more issues, some of which you touch on, such as
with regard to addressing issues (the MANET WG is about
routing). The AUTOCONF WG was intended to address these but
that has not been a great success. Nor am I claiming MANET
has produced all the answers to all the routing-related
problems. Part of what's missing is rationale and explanatory
material explaining how you can do more than might be obvious
with what does exist. (There are RFCs 2501 and 5889, but
there is more material known to people working in these areas
than those capture.)
--
Christopher Dearlove
Technology Leader, Communications Group
Communications and Networks Capability
BAE Systems Advanced Technology Centre
West Hanningfield Road, Great Baddow, Chelmsford, CM2 8HN, UK
Tel: +44 1245 242194 Fax: +44 1245 242124
BAE Systems (Operations) Limited
Registered Office: Warwick House, PO Box 87,
Farnborough Aerospace Centre, Farnborough, Hants, GU14 6YU, UK
Registered in England & Wales No: 1996687
-----Original Message-----
From: ietf-bounces(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org
[mailto:ietf-bounces(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org] On Behalf Of
Adam Novak
Sent: 26 August 2011 02:58
To: ietf(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org
Subject: Routing at the Edges of the Internet
*** WARNING ***
This message has originated outside your organisation,
either from an external partner or the Global Internet.
Keep this in mind if you answer this message.
I trust that some of you have seen this article from a while back:
<http://moblog.wiredwings.com/archives/20110315/How-We-Killed-The-Intern
et-And-Nobody-Noticed.html>
An informative except:
"When I open my laptop, I see over ten different wifi access points.
Say I wanted to send data to my friend in the flat next to mine. It is
idiotic that nowadays, I would use the bottleneck subscriber line to
my upstream ISP and my crippled upload speed and push it all the way
across their infrastructure to my neighbors ISP and back to the Wifi
router in reach of mine. The Internet is not meant to be used that
way. Instead, all these wifi networks should be configured to talk to
each other."
I also trust that you are aware of what happened to the Internet in
Egypt (and elsewhere) this spring, where Internet connectivity was
disrupted by shutting down major ISP networks.
I would like to bring the attention of the IETF to what I see as a
fundamental problem with the current architecture of the Internet:
The Internet is not a network.
As part of the development of the Internet, fault-tolerant routing
protocols have been developed that allow a connecdestined fortion to
be maintained, even if the link that was carrying goes down, by
routing packets around the problem. Similarly, packets can be
load-balanced over multiple links for increased bandwidth. However,
the benefits of these technologies are not available to end users. If
I have a smartphone with both a 3G and a Wi-Fi connection, downloads
cannot currently be load-balanced across them. The two interfaces are
on two different networks, which are almost certainly part of two
different autonomous systems. Packets must be addressed to one of the
two interfaces, not the device, and packets addressed to one interface
have no way to be routed to the other. Similar problems arise when a
laptop has both a wired and a wireless connection. Wired networks also
suffer from related difficulties: If I have Verizon and my friend has
Comcast, and we string an Ethernet cable between our houses, packets
for me will still all come down my connection, and packets for my
friend will still all come down theirs.
The Internet, as it currently appears to end-users, has a logical tree
topology: computers connect to your home router, which connects to
your ISP, which connects to the rest of the Internet. Cell phones
connect to the tower, which connects through a backhaul link to the
rest of the Internet. Almost all of the devices involved have multiple
physical interfaces and full IP routing implementations, but only the
default route is ever used. This results in a brittle Internet: the
failure of one ISP router can disconnect a large number of end-users
from the Internet, as well as interrupting communication between those
users, even when those users are, physically, only a few feet from
each other.
My question is this: what IETF work would be needed to add more
routing to the edges of the Internet? If each home or mobile device
was essentially it's own autonomous system, what would this do to
routing table size? To ASN space utilization? How can individuals
interconnect home networks when RIRs do not assign address and AS
number resources to individuals? How might individuals interconnect
home networks without manual routing configuration? Under what
circumstances could an ISP trust a client's claim to have a route to
another client or to another ISP? How might packets sent to a device's
address on one network be routed to that device's address on another
network, while packets to immediately adjacent addresses take the
normal path?
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