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Re: Overlays and encapsulations (was Re: Engineering discussions )

2014-03-10 10:48:07

On 3/9/2014 2:33 PM, Alia Atlas wrote:
In the last few years, there seems to be a drive towards overlays and
additional
packet encapsulations.

If by "few" you mean over 15, agreed: http://www.isi.edu/xbone

E.g., it was nearly 10 years ago that I gave a tutorial at Infocom on virtual and overlays.

> What problems do you see these as solving?

These have been addressed in a multitude of IETF WGs and RGs over the past years - currently L2VPN, L3VPN, NVO3, TRILL, LISP, and the past VNRG RG.

The goals are already understood as virtualizing resources (routers, subnets, links, etc., for the same benefit an OS adds to computation:

        - abstraction
        - resource sharing
        - shared resource isolation
        - software/service reuse

Is
there a
more focused way to consider the drivers and downsides?

Although network virtualization has been around for a long time, even actively being developed in the IETF, stepping back to look at the long view is starting to gain more traction. I agree that the wheel is being reinvented, esp. with a lot of recent "X over UDP" proposals.

FWIW, INTAREA has a tunnels document that Mark Townsley and I started a few years ago on which work is resuming. A revision will be out soon. That document focuses on IP over encapsulation X, esp where X is also (or ultimately) IP, but a lot of the principles may be of more general applicability.

Joe