6bone Routing [was RIPng & tunnels]

[Bob Hinden]

Folks,

The address allocation scheme defined in RFC1897 uses the autonomous system
as the top level of the address.  The intent behind this (besides making
address allocation easy) was that there would be one route per organization
having a set of IPv6 nodes.  All of the routes in one organization
(identified by the AS number) should aggregate into one route.  Seems to me
that until we get many thousands of organizations on the 6bone, this is not
too many routes.  I even think that it would be good to get some early
experience with large IPv6 routing tables.

When the 6bone grows out of this AS style of routing, we can start
renumbering the organizations to either aggregatable AS numbers or
(probably better) real IPv6 addresses as specified in the unicast address
allocation document.  I think it will be a very good thing if we get some
early experience runumbering IPv6 nodes.  We should not try very hard to
avoid this.

From this I would see the following steps:
Status: RO

  1) Start with static routes (what we are doing today)
  2) Install RIPng on 6bone routers create a reasonable routing topology (some
     alternative paths, try to avoid multiple ocean hops)
  3) At some point (when routing tables get too big or routing traffic
     exceeds some limit) renumber the IPv6 nodes reduce the number of
     routes (greater aggregation).

Comments?

Bob