Subject: A new draft on inter-domain level resource management

From: Ping Pan <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 17 Jan 2000 11:44:07 -0500

Hi, all,

We have just submitted a draft, "BGRP: A Framework for Scalable Resource
Reservation". It describes a new scalable signaling protocol that can
setup reservation trunks/MPLS LSP's over multiple internet domains. I
think that people on the above mailing lists may want to take a look at
it.

You may find the draft in 

http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~pingpan/papers/draft-pan-bgrp-framework-00.txt

Some more information is in

http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~pingpan/projects/bgrp.html

Here are some of the highlights:

- Why not RSVP?

In RSVP, PATH messages are required to pin-down reservation routes prior
to the actual reservation. Thus with PATH/RESV, each route has to
maintain both source and destination information. This would cause the
N**2 problem, where N is total number of end users. In our proposal, we
suggest to have senders probing the network, but the routers don't have
to store the probing information. The routers only have to remember the
reservation destination (that is, sink-tree model). This would reduce
the problem to O(N).

- Useful to MPLS and TE

Each link may not have too many end-host real-time reservations all at
once. But to apply traffic engineering, the ISP's may want to setup a
fully connected LSP network. With RSVP/LDP, N**2 would be a problem. We
proposed a different way for setting up the LSP's for inter-domain.

- DiffServ

IMHO, DiffServ is good for data aggregation so that the routers don't
have to maintain micro-flow information as in IntServ. But DiffServ is
NOT a control mechanism. Our proposal can be used to setup DiffServ
trunks across the network.

- Routing interface

We interface with BGP for reservation routes. If we look at the network
today, BGP with route aggregation provides nice sink-trees to all
destination networks. Our objective is to set up reservations along the
BGP routes. 

So please take a look at our draft. We have collected a lot of traffic
traces with the help from NLANR people. From the trace, we observed some
very interesting behaviors with source/destination data. Also we have
talked (formally and informally) to many developers and operation people
to make sure our scheme would work. Thanks to them all.

This is a new area of work on inter-domain resource management, which I
believe it would be useful in the near future. We would like to hear
from all of you to make sure we didn't think in the wrong direction.

Thank you all in advance!

--
Ping, Ellen, Henning