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- Network Working Group C. Partridge
- Request for Comments: 1726 BBN Systems and Technologies
- Category: Informational F. Kastenholz
- FTP Software
- December 1994
-
- Technical Criteria for Choosing
- IP The Next Generation (IPng)
-
- Status of this Memo
-
- This memo provides information for the Internet community. This memo
- does not specify an Internet standard of any kind. Distribution of
- this memo is unlimited.
-
- Abstract
-
- This document was submitted to the IPng Area in response to RFC 1550.
- Publication of this document does not imply acceptance by the IPng
- Area of any ideas expressed within. Comments should be submitted to
- the big-internet@munnari.oz.au mailing list. This RFC specifies
- criteria related to mobility for consideration in design and
- selection of the Next Generation of IP.
-
- Table of Contents
-
- 1. Introduction. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
- 2. Goals . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
- 3. Note on Terminology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
- 4. General Principles. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
- 4.1 Architectural Simplicity. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
- 4.2 One Protocol to Bind Them All . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
- 4.3 Live Long . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
- 4.4 Live Long AND Prosper . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
- 4.5 Co-operative Anarchy. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
- 5. Criteria. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
- 5.1 Scale . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
- 5.2 Topological Flexibility . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
- 5.3 Performance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
- 5.4 Robust Service. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
- 5.5 Transition. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
- 5.6 Media Independence. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
- 5.7 Unreliable Datagram Service . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
- 5.8 Configuration, Administration, and Operation. . . . . . . 16
- 5.9 Secure Operation. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
- 5.10 Unique Naming . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18
- 5.11 Access. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
- 5.12 Multicast . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20
-
-
-
- Partridge and Kastenholz [Page 1]
-
- RFC 1726 IPng Technical Criteria December 1994
-
-
- 5.13 Extensibility . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
- 5.13.1 Algorithms. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22
- 5.13.2 Headers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22
- 5.13.3 Data Structures . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22
- 5.13.4 Packets . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22
- 5.14 Network Service . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22
- 5.15 Support for Mobility. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24
- 5.16 Control Protocol. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25
- 5.17 Private Networks. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25
- 6. Things We Chose Not to Require. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26
- 6.1 Fragmentation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26
- 6.2 IP Header Checksum. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26
- 6.3 Firewalls . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27
- 6.4 Network Management. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27
- 6.5 Accounting. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27
- 6.6 Routing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27
- 6.6.1 Scale . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28
- 6.6.2 Policy. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28
- 6.6.3 QOS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28
- 6.6.4 Feedback. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28
- 6.6.5 Stability . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28
- 6.6.6 Multicast . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29
- 7. References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29
- 8. Security Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30
- 9. Acknowledgements. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30
- 10. Authors' Addresses. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31
-
- 1. Introduction
-
- This version of this memo was commissioned by the IPng area of the
- IETF in order to define a set of criteria to be used in evaluating
- the protocols being proposed for adoption as the next generation of
- IP.
-
- The criteria presented here were culled from several sources,
- including "IP Version 7" [1], "IESG Deliberations on Routing and
- Addressing" [2], "Towards the Future Internet Architecture" [3], the
- IPng Requirements BOF held at the Washington D.C. IETF Meeting in
- December of 1992, the IPng Working Group meeting at the Seattle IETF
- meeting in March 1994, the discussions held on the Big-Internet
- mailing list (big-internet@munnari.oz.au, send requests to join to
- big-internet-request@munnari.oz.au), discussions with the IPng Area
- Directors and Directorate, and the mailing lists devoted to the
- individual IPng efforts.
-
- This document presumes that a new IP-layer protocol is actually
- desired. There is some discussion in the community as to whether we
- can extend the life of IPv4 for a significant amount of time by
-
-
-
- Partridge and Kastenholz [Page 2]
-
- RFC 1726 IPng Technical Criteria December 1994
-
-
- better engineering of, e.g., routing protocols, or we should develop
- IPng now. This question is not addressed in this document.
-
- We would like to gratefully acknowledge the assistance of literally
- hundreds of people who shared their views and insights with us.
- However, this memo is solely the personal opinion of the authors and
- in no way represents, nor should it be construed as representing, the
- opinion of the ISOC, the IAB, the IRTF, the IESG, the IETF, the
- Internet community as a whole, nor the authors' respective employers.
-
- 2. Goals
-
- We believe that by developing a list of criteria for evaluating
- proposals for IP The Next Generation (IPng), the IETF will make it
- easier for developers of proposals to prioritize their work and
- efforts and make reasoned choices as to where they should spend
- relatively more and less time. Furthermore, a list of criteria may
- help the IETF community determine which proposals are serious
- contenders for a next generation IP, and which proposals are
- insufficient to the task. Note that these criteria are probably not
- sufficient to make final decisions about which proposal is best.
- Questions such as whether to trade a little performance (e.g.,
- packets per second routed) for slightly more functionality (e.g.,
- more flexible routing) cannot be easily addressed by a simple list of
- criteria. However, at minimum, we believe that protocols that meet
- these criteria are capable of serving as the future IPng.
-
- This set of criteria originally began as an ordered list, with the
- goal of ranking the importance of various criteria. Eventually, the
- layout evolved into the current form, where each criterion was
- presented without weighting, but a time frame, indicating
- approximately when a specific criterion, or feature of a criterion,
- should be available was added to the specification.
-
- We have attempted to state the criteria in the form of goals or
- requirements and not demand specific engineering solutions. For
- example, there has been talk in the community of making route
- aggregation a requirement. We believe that route aggregation is not,
- in and of itself, a requirement but rather one part of a solution to
- the real problem of scaling to some very large, complex topology.
- Therefore, route aggregation is NOT listed as a requirement; instead,
- the more general functional goal of having the routing scale is
- listed instead of the particular mechanism of route aggregation.
-
- In determining the relative timing of the various criteria, we have
- had two guiding principles. First, IPng must offer an internetwork
- service akin to that of IPv4, but improved to handle the well-known
- and widely-understood problems of scaling the Internet architecture
-
-
-
- Partridge and Kastenholz [Page 3]
-
- RFC 1726 IPng Technical Criteria December 1994
-
-
- to more end-points and an ever increasing range of bandwidths.
- Second, it must be desirable for users and network managers to
- upgrade their equipment to support IPng. At a minimum, this second
- point implies that there must be a straightforward way to transition
- systems from IPv4 to IPng. But it also strongly suggests that IPng
- should offer features that IPv4 does not; new features provide a
- motivation to deploy IPng more quickly.
-
- 3. Note on Terminology
-
- The existing proposals tend distinguish between end-point
- identification of, e.g., individual hosts, and topological addresses
- of network attachment points. In this memo we do not make that
- distinction. We use the term "address" as it is currently used in
- IPv4; i.e., for both the identification of a particular endpoint or
- host AND as the topological address of a point on the network. We
- presume that if the endpoint/ address split remains, the proposals
- will make the proper distinctions with respect to the criteria
- enumerated below.
-
- 4. General Principles
-
- 4.1 Architectural Simplicity
-
- In anything at all, perfection is finally attained not
- when there is no longer anything to add, but when there
- is no longer anything to take away.
-
- Antoine de Saint-Exupery
-
- We believe that many communications functions are more appropriately
- performed at protocol layers other than the IP layer. We see
- protocol stacks as hourglass-shaped, with IPng in the middle, or
- waist, of the hourglass. As such, essentially all higher-layer
- protocols make use of and rely upon IPng. Similarly IPng, by virtue
- of its position in the "protocol hourglass" encompasses a wide
- variety of lower-layer protocols. When IPng does not perform a
- particular function or provide a certain service, it should not get
- in the way of the other elements of the protocol stack which may well
- wish to perform the function.
-
- 4.2 One Protocol to Bind Them All
-
- One of the most important aspects of The Internet is that it provides
- global IP-layer connectivity. The IP layer provides the point of
- commonality among all of the nodes on the Internet. In effect, the
- main goal of the Internet is to provide an IP Connectivity Service to
- all who wish it.
-
-
-
- Partridge and Kastenholz [Page 4]
-
- RFC 1726 IPng Technical Criteria December 1994
-
-
- This does NOT say that the Internet is a One-Protocol Internet. The
- Internet is today, and shall remain in the future, a Multi-Protocol
- Internet. Multi-Protocol operations are required to allow for
- continued testing, experimentation, and development and because
- service providers' customers clearly want to be able to run protocols
- such as CLNP, DECNET, and Novell over their Internet connections.
-
- 4.3 Live Long
-
- It is very difficult to change a protocol as central to the workings
- of the Internet as IP. Even more problematic is changing such a
- protocol frequently. This simply can not be done. We believe that it
- is impossible to expect the community to make significant, non-
- backward compatible changes to the IP layer more often than once
- every 10-15 years. In order to be conservative, we strongly urge
- protocol developers to consider what the Internet will look like in
- 20 years and design their protocols to fit that vision.
-
- As a data point, the SNMP community has had great difficulty moving
- from SNMPv1 to SNMPv2. Frequent changes in software are hard.
-
- 4.4 Live Long AND Prosper
-
- We believe that simply allowing for bigger addresses and more
- efficient routing is not enough of a benefit to encourage vendors,
- service providers, and users to switch to IPng, with its attendant
- disruptions of service, etc. These problems can be solved much more
- simply with faster routers, balkanization of the Internet address
- space, and other hacks.
-
- We believe that there must be positive functional or operational
- benefits to switching to IPng.
-
- In other words, IPng must be able to live for a long time AND it must
- allow the Internet to prosper and to grow to serve new applications
- and user needs.
-
- 4.5 Co-operative Anarchy
-
- A major contributor to the Internet's success is the fact that there
- is no single, centralized, point of control or promulgator of policy
- for the entire network. This allows individual constituents of the
- network to tailor their own networks, environments, and policies to
- suit their own needs. The individual constituents must cooperate
- only to the degree necessary to ensure that they interoperate.
-
-
-
-
-
-
- Partridge and Kastenholz [Page 5]
-
- RFC 1726 IPng Technical Criteria December 1994
-
-
- We believe that this decentralized and decoupled nature of the
- Internet must be preserved. Only a minimum amount of centralization
- or forced cooperation will be tolerated by the community as a whole.
-
- We also believe that there are some tangible benefits to this
- decoupled nature. For example,
-
- * It is easier to experiment with new protocols and services and then
- roll out intermediate and final results in a controlled fashion.
- * By eliminating a single point of control, a single point of failure
- is also eliminated, making it much less likely that the entire
- network will fail.
- * It allows the administrative tasks for the network to be more
- widely distributed.
-
- An example of the benefits of this "Cooperative Anarchy" can be seen
- in the benefits derived from using the Domain Naming System over the
- original HOSTS.TXT system.
-
- 5. Criteria
-
- This section enumerates the criteria against which we suggest the IP
- The Next Generation proposals be evaluated.
-
- Each criterion is presented in its own section. The first paragraph
- of each section is a short, one or two sentence statement of the
- criterion. Additional paragraphs then explain the criterion in more
- detail, clarify what it does and does not say and provide some
- indication of its relative importance.
-
- Also, each criterion includes a subsection called "Time Frame". This
- is intended to give a rough indication of when the authors believe
- that the particular criterion will become "important". We believe
- that if an element of technology is significant enough to include in
- this document then we probably understand the technology enough to
- predict how important that technology will be. In general, these
- time frames indicate that, within the desired time frame, we should
- be able to get an understanding of how the feature will be added to a
- protocol, perhaps after discussions with the engineers doing the
- development. Time Frame is not a deployment schedule since
- deployment schedules depend on non-technical issues, such as vendors
- determining whether a market exists, users fitting new releases into
- their systems, and so on.
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
- Partridge and Kastenholz [Page 6]
-
- RFC 1726 IPng Technical Criteria December 1994
-
-
- 5.1 Scale
-
- CRITERION
- The IPng Protocol must scale to allow the identification and
- addressing of at least 10**12 end systems (and preferably much
- more). The IPng Protocol, and its associated routing protocols
- and architecture must allow for at least 10**9 individual networks
- (and preferably more). The routing schemes must scale at a rate
- that is less than the square root of the number of constituent
- networks [10].
-
- DISCUSSION
- The initial, motivating, purpose of the IPng effort is to allow
- the Internet to grow beyond the size constraints imposed by the
- current IPv4 addressing and routing technologies.
-
- Both aspects of scaling are important. If we can't route then
- connecting all these hosts is worthless, but without connected
- hosts, there's no point in routing, so we must scale in both
- directions.
-
- In any proposal, particular attention must be paid to describing
- the routing hierarchy, how the routing and addressing will be
- organized, how different layers of the routing interact, and the
- relationship between addressing and routing.
-
- Particular attention must be paid to describing what happens when
- the size of the network approaches these limits. How are network,
- forwarding, and routing performance affected? Does performance
- fall off or does the network simply stop as the limit is neared.
-
- This criterion is the essential problem motivating the transition
- to IPng. If the proposed protocol does not satisfy this criteria,
- there is no point in considering it.
-
- We note that one of the white papers solicited for the IPng
- process [5] indicates that 10**12 end nodes is a reasonable
- estimate based on the expected number of homes in the world and
- adding two orders of magnitude for "safety". However, this white
- paper treats each home in the world as an end-node of a world-wide
- Internet. We believe that each home in the world will in fact be
- a network of the world-wide Internet. Therefore, if we take [5]'s
- derivation of 10**12 as accurate, and change their assumption that
- a home will be an end-node to a home being a network, we may
- expect that there will be the need to support at least 10**12
- networks, with the possibility of supporting up to 10**15 end-
- nodes.
-
-
-
-
- Partridge and Kastenholz [Page 7]
-
- RFC 1726 IPng Technical Criteria December 1994
-
-
- Time Frame
- Any IPng proposal should be able to show immediately that it has
- an architecture for the needed routing protocols, addressing
- schemes, abstraction techniques, algorithms, data structures, and
- so on that can support growth to the required scales.
-
- Actual development, specification, and deployment of the needed
- protocols can be deferred until IPng deployment has extended far
- enough to require such protocols. A proposed IPng should be able
- to demonstrate ahead of time that it can scale as needed.
-
- 5.2 Topological Flexibility
-
- CRITERION
- The routing architecture and protocols of IPng must allow for many
- different network topologies. The routing architecture and
- protocols must not assume that the network's physical structure is
- a tree.
-
- DISCUSSION
- As the Internet becomes ever more global and ubiquitous, it will
- develop new and different topologies. We already see cases where
- the network hierarchy is very "broad" with many subnetworks, each
- with only a few hosts and where it is very "narrow", with few
- subnetworks each with many hosts. We can expect these and other
- topological forms in the future. Furthermore, since we expect
- that IPng will allow for many more levels of hierarchy than are
- allowed under IPv4, we can expect very "tall" and very "short"
- topologies as well.
-
- Constituent organizations of the Internet should be allowed to
- structure their internal topologies in any manner they see fit.
- Within reasonable implementation limits, organizations should be
- allowed to structure their addressing in any manner. We
- specifically wish to point out that if the network's topology or
- addressing is hierarchical, constituent organizations should be
- able to allocate to themselves as many levels of hierarchy as they
- wish.
-
- It is very possible that the diameter of the Internet will grow to
- be extremely large; perhaps larger than 256 hops.
-
- Neither the current, nor the future, Internet will be physically
- structured as a tree, nor can we assume that connectivity can
- occur only between certain points in the graph. The routing and
- addressing architectures must allow for multiply connected
- networks and be able to utilize multiple paths for any reason,
- including redundancy, load sharing, type- and quality-of-service
-
-
-
- Partridge and Kastenholz [Page 8]
-
- RFC 1726 IPng Technical Criteria December 1994
-
-
- differentiation.
-
- Time Frame
- We believe that Topological Flexibility is an inherent element of
- a protocol and therefore should be immediately demonstrable in an
- IPng proposal.
-
- 5.3 Performance
-
- CRITERION
- A state of the art, commercial grade router must be able to
- process and forward IPng traffic at speeds capable of fully
- utilizing common, commercially available, high-speed media at the
- time. Furthermore, at a minimum, a host must be able to achieve
- data transfer rates with IPng comparable to the rates achieved
- with IPv4, using similar levels of host resources.
-
- DISCUSSION
- Network media speeds are constantly increasing. It is essential
- that the Internet's switching elements (routers) be able to keep
- up with the media speeds.
-
- We limit this requirement to commercially available routers and
- media. If some network site can obtain a particular media
- technology "off the shelf", then it should also be able to obtain
- the needed routing technology "off the shelf." One can always go
- into some laboratory or research center and find newer, faster,
- technologies for network media and for routing. We do believe,
- however, that IPng should be routable at a speed sufficient to
- fully utilize the fastest available media, though that might
- require specially built, custom, devices.
-
- We expect that more and more services will be available over the
- Internet. It is not unreasonable, therefore, to expect that the
- ratio of "local" traffic (i.e., the traffic that stays on one's
- local network) to "export" traffic (i.e., traffic destined to or
- sourced from a network other than one's own local network) will
- change, and the percent of export traffic will increase.
-
- We note that the host performance requirement should not be taken
- to imply that IPng need only be as good as IPv4. If an IPng
- candidate can achieve better performance with equivalent resources
- (or equivalent transfer rates with fewer resources) vis-a-vis IPv4
- then so much the better. We also observe that many researchers
- believe that a proper IPng router should be capable of routing
- IPng traffic over links at speeds that are capable of fully
- utilizing an ATM switch on the link.
-
-
-
-
- Partridge and Kastenholz [Page 9]
-
- RFC 1726 IPng Technical Criteria December 1994
-
-
- Some developments indicate that the use of very high speed point-
- to-point connections may become commonplace. In particular, [5]
- indicates that OC-3 speeds may be widely used in the Cable TV
- Industry and there may be many OC-3 speed lines connecting to
- central switching elements.
-
- Processing of the IPng header, and subsequent headers (such as the
- transport header), can be made more efficient by aligning fields
- on their natural boundaries and making header lengths integral
- multiples of typical word lengths (32, 64, and 128 bits have been
- suggested) in order to preserve alignment in following headers.
-
- We point out that optimizing the header's fields and lengths only
- to today's processors may not be sufficient for the long term.
- Processor word and cache-line lengths, and memory widths are
- constantly increasing. In doing header optimizations, the
- designer should predict word-widths one or two CPU generations
- into the future and optimize accordingly. If IPv4 and TCP had been
- optimized for processors common when they were designed, they
- would be very efficient for 6502s and Z-80s.
-
- Time Frame
- An IPng proposal must provide a plausible argument of how it will
- scale up in performance. (Obviously no one can completely predict
- the future, but the idea is to illustrate that if technology
- trends in processor performance and memory performance continue,
- and perhaps using techniques like parallelism, there is reason to
- believe the proposed IPng will scale as technology scales).
-
- 5.4 Robust Service
-
- CRITERION
- The network service and its associated routing and control
- protocols must be robust.
-
- DISCUSSION
- Murphy's Law applies to networking. Any proposed IPng protocol
- must be well-behaved in the face of malformed packets, mis-
- information, and occasional failures of links, routers and hosts.
- IPng should perform gracefully in response to willful management
- and configuration mistakes (i.e., service outages should be
- minimized).
-
- Putting this requirement another way, IPng must make it possible
- to continue the Internet tradition of being conservative in what
- is sent, but liberal in what one is willing to receive.
-
-
-
-
-
- Partridge and Kastenholz [Page 10]
-
- RFC 1726 IPng Technical Criteria December 1994
-
-
- We note that IPv4 is reasonably robust and any proposed IPng must
- be at least as robust as IPv4.
-
- Hostile attacks on the network layer and Byzantine failure modes
- must be dealt with in a safe and graceful manner.
-
- We note that Robust Service is, in some form, a part of security
- and vice-versa.
-
- The detrimental effects of failures, errors, buggy
- implementations, and misconfigurations must be localized as much
- as possible. For example, misconfiguring a workstation's IP
- Address should not break the routing protocols. in the event of
- misconfigurations, IPng must to be able to detect and at least
- warn, if not work around, any misconfigurations.
-
- Due to its size, complexity, decentralized administration, error-
- prone users and administrators, and so on, The Internet is a very
- hostile environment. If a protocol can not be used in such a
- hostile environment then it is not suitable for use in the
- Internet.
-
- Some predictions have been made that, as the Internet grows and as
- more and more technically less-sophisticated sites get connected,
- there will be more failures in the network. These failures may be
- a combination of simple size; if the size of the network goes up
- by a factor of n, then the total number of failures in the network
- can be expected to increase by some function of n. Also, as the
- network's users become less sophisticated, it can be assumed that
- they will make more, innocent and well meaning, mistakes, either
- in configuration or use of their systems.
-
- The IPng protocols should be able to continue operating in an
- environment that suffers more, total, outages than we are
- currently used to. Similarly, the protocols must protect the
- general population from errors (either of omission or commission)
- made by individual users and sites.
-
- Time Frame
- We believe that the elements of Robust Service should be available
- immediately in the protocol with two exceptions.
-
- The security aspects of Robust Service are, in fact, described
- elsewhere in this document.
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
- Partridge and Kastenholz [Page 11]
-
- RFC 1726 IPng Technical Criteria December 1994
-
-
- Protection against Byzantine failure modes is not needed
- immediately. A proposed architecture for it should be done
- immediately. Prototype development should be completed in 12-18
- months, with final deployment as needed.
-
- 5.5 Transition
-
- CRITERION
- The protocol must have a straightforward transition plan from the
- current IPv4.
-
- DISCUSSION
- A smooth, orderly, transition from IPv4 to IPng is needed. If we
- can't transition to the new protocol, then no matter how wonderful
- it is, we'll never get to it.
-
- We believe that it is not possible to have a "flag-day" form of
- transition in which all hosts and routers must change over at
- once. The size, complexity, and distributed administration of the
- Internet make such a cutover impossible.
-
- Rather, IPng will need to co-exist with IPv4 for some period of
- time. There are a number of ways to achieve this co-existence
- such as requiring hosts to support two stacks, converting between
- protocols, or using backward compatible extensions to IPv4. Each
- scheme has its strengths and weaknesses, which have to be weighed.
-
- Furthermore, we note that, in all probability, there will be IPv4
- hosts on the Internet effectively forever. IPng must provide
- mechanisms to allow these hosts to communicate, even after IPng
- has become the dominant network layer protocol in the Internet.
-
- The absence of a rational and well-defined transition plan is not
- acceptable. Indeed, the difficulty of running a network that is
- transitioning from IPv4 to IPng must be minimized. (A good target
- is that running a mixed IPv4-IPng network should be no more and
- preferably less difficult than running IPv4 in parallel with
- existing non-IP protocols).
-
- Furthermore, a network in transition must still be robust. IPng
- schemes which maximize stability and connectivity in mixed IPv4-
- IPng networks are preferred.
-
- Finally, IPng is expected to evolve over time and therefore, it
- must be possible to have multiple versions of IPng, some in
- production use, some in experimental, developmental, or evaluation
- use, to coexist on the network. Transition plans must address
- this issue.
-
-
-
- Partridge and Kastenholz [Page 12]
-
- RFC 1726 IPng Technical Criteria December 1994
-
-
- The transition plan must address the following general areas of
- the Internet's infrastructure:
-
- Host Protocols and Software
- Router Protocols and Software
- Security and Authentication
- Domain Name System
- Network Management
- Operations Tools (e.g., Ping and Traceroute)
- Operations and Administration procedures
-
- The impact on protocols which use IP addresses as data (e.g., DNS,
- distributed file systems, SNMP and FTP) must be specifically
- addressed.
-
- The transition plan should address the issue of cost distribution.
- That is, it should identify what tasks are required of the service
- providers, of the end users, of the backbones and so on.
-
- Time Frame
- A transition plan is required immediately.
-
- 5.6 Media Independence
-
- CRITERION
- The protocol must work across an internetwork of many different
- LAN, MAN, and WAN media, with individual link speeds ranging from
- a ones-of-bits per second to hundreds of gigabits per second.
- Multiple-access and point-to-point media must be supported, as
- must media supporting both switched and permanent circuits.
-
- DISCUSSION
- The joy of IP is that it works over just about anything. This
- generality must be preserved. The ease of adding new
- technologies, and ability to continue operating with old
- technologies must be maintained.
-
- We believe this range of speed is right for the next twenty years,
- though we may wish to require terabit performance at the high-end.
- We believe that, at a minimum, media running at 500 gigabits per
- second will be commonly available within 10 years. The low end of
- the link-speed range is based on the speed of systems like pagers
- and ELF (ELF connects to submerged submarines and has a "speed" on
- the order of <10 characters per second).
-
- By switched circuits we mean both "permanent" connections such as
- X.25 and Frame Relay services AND "temporary" types of dialup
- connections similar to today's SLIP and dialup PPP services, and
-
-
-
- Partridge and Kastenholz [Page 13]
-
- RFC 1726 IPng Technical Criteria December 1994
-
-
- perhaps, ATM SVCs. The latter form of connection implies that
- dynamic network access (i.e., the ability to unplug a machine,
- move it to a different point on the network topology, and plug it
- back in, possibly with a changed IPng address) is required. We
- note that this is an aspect of mobility.
-
- By work, we mean we have hopes that a stream of IPng datagrams
- (whether from one source, or many) can come close to filling the
- link at high speeds, but also scales gracefully to low speeds.
-
- Many network media are multi-protocol. It is essential that IPng
- be able to peacefully co-exist on such media with other protocols.
- Routers and hosts must be able to discriminate among the protocols
- that might be present on such a medium. For example, on an
- Ethernet, a specific, IPng Ethernet Type value might be called
- for; or the old IPv4 Ethernet type is used and the first four
- (version number in the old IPv4 header) bits would distinguish
- between IPv4 and IPng.
-
- Different media have different MAC address formats and schemes.
- It must be possible for a node to dynamically determine the MAC
- address of a node given that node's IP address. We explicitly
- prohibit using static, manually configured mappings as the
- standard approach.
-
- Another aspect of this criterion is that many different MTUs will
- be found in an IPng internetwork. An IPng must be able to operate
- in such a multi-MTU environment. It must be able to adapt to the
- MTUs of the physical media over which it operates. Two possible
- techniques for dealing with this are path MTU discovery and
- fragmentation and reassembly; other techniques might certainly be
- developed.
-
- We note that, as of this writing (mid 1994), ATM seems to be set
- to become a major network media technology. Any IPng should be
- designed to operate over ATM. However, IPng still must be able to
- operate over other, more "traditional" network media.
- Furthermore, a host on an ATM network must be able to interoperate
- with a host on another, non-ATM, medium, with no more difficulty
- or complexity than hosts on different media can interoperate today
- using IPv4.
-
- IPng must be able to deal both with "dumb" media, such as we have
- today, and newer, more intelligent, media. In particular, IPng
- functions must be able to exist harmoniously with lower-layer
- realizations of the same, or similar, functions. Routing and
- resource management are two areas where designers should pay
- particular attention. Some subnetwork technologies may include
-
-
-
- Partridge and Kastenholz [Page 14]
-
- RFC 1726 IPng Technical Criteria December 1994
-
-
- integral accounting and billing capabilities, and IPng must
- provide the correct control information to such subnetworks.
-
- Time Frame
- Specifications for current media encapsulations (i.e., all
- encapsulations that are currently Proposed standards, or higher,
- in the IETF) are required immediately. These specifications must
- include any auxiliary protocols needed (such as an address
- resolution mechanism for Ethernet or the link control protocol for
- PPP). A general 'guide' should also be available immediately to
- help others develop additional media encapsulations. Other,
- newer, encapsulations can be developed as the need becomes
- apparent.
-
- Van Jacobson-like header compression should be shown immediately,
- as should any other aspects of very-low-speed media. Similarly,
- any specific aspects of high-speed media should be shown
- immediately.
-
- 5.7 Unreliable Datagram Service
-
- CRITERION
- The protocol must support an unreliable datagram delivery service.
-
- DISCUSSION
- We like IP's datagram service and it seems to work very well. So
- we must keep it. In particular, the ability, within IPv4, to send
- an independent datagram, without prearrangement, is extremely
- valuable (in fact, may be required for some applications such as
- SNMP) and must be retained.
-
- Furthermore, the design principle that says that we can take any
- datagram and throw it away with no warning or other action, or
- take any router and turn it off with no warning, and have datagram
- traffic still work, is very powerful. This vastly enhances the
- robustness of the network and vastly eases administration and
- maintenance of the network. It also vastly simplifies the design
- and implementation of software [14].
-
- Furthermore, the Unreliable Datagram Service should support some
- minimal level of service; something that is approximately
- equivalent to IPv4 service. This has two functions; it eases the
- task of IPv4/IPng translating systems in mapping IPv4 traffic to
- IPng and vice versa, and it simplifies the task of fitting IPng
- into small, limited environments such as boot ROMs.
-
- Time Frame
- Unreliable Datagram Service must be available immediately.
-
-
-
- Partridge and Kastenholz [Page 15]
-
- RFC 1726 IPng Technical Criteria December 1994
-
-
- 5.8 Configuration, Administration, and Operation
-
- CRITERION
- The protocol must permit easy and largely distributed
- configuration and operation. Automatic configuration of hosts and
- routers is required.
-
- DISCUSSION
- People complain that IP is hard to manage. We cannot plug and
- play. We must fix that problem.
-
- We do note that fully automated configuration, especially for
- large, complex networks, is still a topic of research. Our
- concern is mostly for small and medium sized, less complex,
- networks; places where the essential knowledge and skills would
- not be as readily available.
-
- In dealing with this criterion, address assignment and delegation
- procedures and restrictions should be addressed by the proposal.
- Furthermore, "ownership" of addresses (e.g., user or service
- provider) has recently become a concern and the issue should be
- addressed.
-
- We require that a node be able to dynamically obtain all of its
- operational, IP-level parameters at boot time via a dynamic
- configuration mechanism.
-
- A host must be able to dynamically discover routers on the host's
- local network. Ideally, the information which a host learns via
- this mechanism would also allow the host to make a rational
- selection of which first-hop router to send any given packet to.
- IPng must not mandate that users or administrators manually
- configure first-hop routers into hosts.
-
- Also, a strength of IPv4 has been its ability to be used on
- isolated subnets. IPng hosts must be able to work on networks
- without routers present.
-
- Additional elements of this criterion are:
-
- * Ease of address allocation.
- * Ease of changing the topology of the network within a particular
- routing domain.
- * Ease of changing network provider.
- * Ease of (re)configuring host/endpoint parameters such as
- addressing and identification.
- * Ease of (re)configuring router parameters such as addressing and
- identification.
-
-
-
- Partridge and Kastenholz [Page 16]
-
- RFC 1726 IPng Technical Criteria December 1994
-
-
- * Address allocation and assignment authority must be delegated as
- far 'down' the administrative hierarchy as possible.
-
- The requirements of this section apply only to IPng and its
- supporting protocols (such as for routing, address resolution, and
- network-layer control). Specifically, as far as IPng is
- concerned, we are concerned only with how routers and hosts get
- their configuration information.
-
- We note that in general, automatic configuration of hosts is a
- large and complex problem and getting the configuration
- information into hosts and routers is only one, small, piece of
- the problem. A large amount of additional, non-Internet-layer
- work is needed in order to be able to do "plug-and-play"
- networking. Other aspects of "plug-and-play" networking include
- things like: Autoregistration of new nodes with DNS, configuring
- security service systems (e.g., Kerberos), setting up email relays
- and mail servers, locating network resources, adding entries to
- NFS export files, and so on. To a large degree, these
- capabilities do not have any dependence on the IPng protocol
- (other than, perhaps, the format of addresses).
-
- We require that any IPng proposal not impede or prevent, in any
- way, the development of "plug-and-play" network configuration
- technologies.
-
- Automatic configuration of network nodes must not prevent users or
- administrators from also being able to manually configure their
- systems.
-
- Time Frame
- A method for plug and play on small subnets is immediately
- required.
-
- We believe that this is an extremely critical area for any IPng as
- a major complaint of the IP community as a whole is the difficulty
- in administering large IP networks. Furthermore, ease of
- installation is likely to speed the deployment of IPng.
-
- 5.9 Secure Operation
-
- CRITERION
- IPng must provide a secure network layer.
-
- DISCUSSION
- We need to be sure that we have not created a network that is a
- cracker's playground.
-
-
-
-
- Partridge and Kastenholz [Page 17]
-
- RFC 1726 IPng Technical Criteria December 1994
-
-
- In order to meet the Robustness criterion, some elements of what
- is commonly shrugged off as "security" are needed; e.g., to prevent
- a villain from injecting bogus routing packets, and destroying the
- routing system within the network. This criterion covers those
- aspects of security that are not needed to provide the Robustness
- criterion.
-
- Another aspect of security is non-repudiation of origin. In order
- to adequately support the expected need for simple accounting, we
- believe that this is a necessary feature.
-
- In order to safely support requirements of the commercial world,
- IPng-level security must have capabilities to prevent
- eavesdroppers from monitoring traffic and deducing traffic
- patterns. This is particularly important in multi-access networks
- such as cable TV networks [5].
-
- Aspects of security at the IP level to be considered include:
-
- * Denial of service protections [6],
- * Continuity of operations [6],
- * Precedence and preemption [6],
- * Ability to allow rule-based access control technologies [6]
- * Protection of routing and control-protocol operations [9],
- * Authentication of routing information exchanges, packets, data,
- and sources (e.g., make sure that the routing packet came from a
- router) [9],
- * QOS security (i.e., protection against improper use of network-
- layer resources, functions, and capabilities),
- * Auto-configuration protocol operations in that the host must be
- assured that it is getting its information from proper sources,
- * Traffic pattern confidentiality is strongly desired by several
- communities [9] and [5].
-
- Time Frame
- Security should be an integral component of any IPng from the
- beginning.
-
- 5.10 Unique Naming
-
- CRITERION
- IPng must assign all IP-Layer objects in the global, ubiquitous,
- Internet unique names. These names may or may not have any
- location, topology, or routing significance.
-
- DISCUSSION
- We use the term "Name" in this criterion synonymously with the
- term "End Point Identifier" as used in the NIMROD proposal, or as
-
-
-
- Partridge and Kastenholz [Page 18]
-
- RFC 1726 IPng Technical Criteria December 1994
-
-
- IP Addresses uniquely identify interfaces/hosts in IPv4. These
- names may or may not carry any routing or topology information.
- See [11] for more discussion on this topic.
-
- IPng must provide identifiers which are suitable for use as
- globally unique, unambiguous, and ubiquitous names for endpoints,
- nodes, interfaces, and the like. Every datagram must carry the
- identifier of both its source and its destination (or some method
- must be available to determine these identifiers, given a
- datagram). We believe that this is required in order to support
- certain accounting functions.
-
- Other functions and uses of unique names are:
-
- * To uniquely identify endpoints (thus if the unique name and
- address are not the same, the TCP pseudo-header should include
- the unique name rather than the address)
- * To allow endpoints to change topological location on the network
- (e.g., migrate) without changing their unique names.
- * To give one or more unique names to a node on the network (i.e.,
- one node may have multiple unique names)
-
- An identifier must refer to one and only one object while that
- object is in existence. Furthermore, after an object ceases to
- exist, the identifier should be kept unused long enough to ensure
- that any packets containing the identifier have drained out of the
- Internet system, and that other references to the identifier have
- probably been lost. We note that the term "existence" is as much
- an administrative issue as a technical one. For example, if a
- workstation is reassigned, given a new IP address and node name,
- and attached to a new subnetwork, is it the same object or not.
- This does argue for a namespace that is relatively large and
- relatively stable.
-
- Time Frame
- We see this as a fundamental element of the IP layer and it should
- be in the protocol from the beginning.
-
- 5.11 Access
-
- CRITERION
- The protocols that define IPng, its associated protocols (similar
- to ARP and ICMP in IPv4) and the routing protocols (as in OSPF,
- BGP, and RIP for IPv4) must be published as standards track RFCs
- and must satisfy the requirements specified in RFC1310. These
- documents should be as freely available and redistributable as the
- IPv4 and related RFCs. There must be no specification-related
- licensing fees for implementing or selling IPng software.
-
-
-
- Partridge and Kastenholz [Page 19]
-
- RFC 1726 IPng Technical Criteria December 1994
-
-
- DISCUSSION
- An essential aspect of the development of the Internet and its
- protocols has been the fact that the protocol specifications are
- freely available to anyone who wishes a copy. Beyond simply
- minimizing the cost of learning about the technology, the free
- access to specifications has made it easy for researchers and
- developers to easily incorporate portions of old protocol
- specifications in the revised specifications. This type of easy
- access to the standards documents is required for IPng.
-
- Time Frame
- An IPng and its related protocols must meet these standards for
- openness before an IPng can be approved.
-
- 5.12 Multicast
-
- CRITERION
- The protocol must support both unicast and multicast packet
- transmission. Part of the multicast capability is a requirement
- to be able to send to "all IP hosts on a given subnetwork".
- Dynamic and automatic routing of multicasts is also required.
-
- DISCUSSION
- IPv4 has made heavy use of the ability to multicast requests to
- all IPv4 hosts on a subnet, especially for autoconfiguration.
- This ability must be retained in IPng.
-
- Unfortunately, IPv4 currently uses the local media broadcast
- address to multicast to all IP hosts. This behavior is anti-
- social in mixed-protocol networks and should be fixed in IPng.
- There's no good reason for IPng to send to all hosts on a subnet
- when it only wishes to send to all IPng hosts. The protocol must
- make allowances for media that do not support true multicasting.
-
- In the past few years, we have begun to deploy support for wide-
- area multicast addressing in the Internet, and it has proved
- valuable. This capability must not be lost in the transition to
- IPng.
-
- The ability to restrict the range of a multicast to specific
- networks is also important. Furthermore, it must be possible to
- "selectively" multicast packets. That is, it must be possible to
- send a multicast to a remote, specific portion or area of the
- Internet (such as a specific network or subnetwork) and then have
- that multicast limited to just that specific area. Furthermore,
- any given network or subnetwork should be capable of supporting
- 2**16 "local" multicast groups, i.e., groups that are not
- propagated to other networks. See [8].
-
-
-
- Partridge and Kastenholz [Page 20]
-
- RFC 1726 IPng Technical Criteria December 1994
-
-
- It should be noted that addressing -- specifically the syntax and
- semantics of addresses -- has a great impact on the scalability of
- the architecture.
-
- Currently, large-scale multicasts are routed manually through the
- Internet. While this is fine for experiments, a "production"
- system requires that multicast-routing be dynamic and automatic.
- Multicast groups must be able to be created and destroyed, hosts
- must be able to join and leave multicast groups and the network
- routing infrastructure must be able to locate new multicast groups
- and destinations and route traffic to those destinations all
- without manual intervention.
-
- Large, topologically dispersed, multicast groups (with up to 10**6
- participants) must be supported. Some applications are given in
- [8].
-
- Time Frame
- Obviously, address formats, algorithms for processing and
- interpreting the multicast addresses must be immediately available
- in IPng. Broadcast and Multicast transmission/reception of
- packets are required immediately. Dynamic routing of multicast
- packets must be available within 18 months.
-
- We believe that Multicast Addressing is vital to support future
- applications such as remote conferencing. It is also used quite
- heavily in the current Internet for things like service location
- and routing.
-
- 5.13 Extensibility
-
- CRITERION
- The protocol must be extensible; it must be able to evolve to meet
- the future service needs of the Internet. This evolution must be
- achievable without requiring network-wide software upgrades. IPng
- is expected to evolve over time. As it evolves, it must be able to
- allow different versions to coexist on the same network.
-
- DISCUSSION
- We do not today know all of the things that we will want the
- Internet to be able to do 10 years from now. At the same time, it
- is not reasonable to ask users to transition to a new protocol
- with each passing decade. Thus, we believe that it must be
- possible to extend IPng to support new services and facilities.
- Furthermore, it is essential that any extensions can be
- incrementally deployed to only those systems which desire to use
- them. Systems upgraded in this fashion must still be able to
- communicate with systems which have not been so upgraded.
-
-
-
- Partridge and Kastenholz [Page 21]
-
- RFC 1726 IPng Technical Criteria December 1994
-
-
- There are several aspects to extensibility:
-
- 5.13.1 Algorithms
- The algorithms used in processing IPng information should be
- decoupled from the protocol itself. It should be possible to
- change these algorithms without necessarily requiring protocol,
- datastructure, or header changes.
-
- 5.13.2 Headers
- The content of packet headers should be extensible. As more
- features and functions are required of IPng, it may be
- necessary to add more information to the IPng headers. We note
- that for IPv4, the use of options has proven less than entirely
- satisfactory since options have tended to be inefficient to
- process.
-
- 5.13.3 Data Structures
- The fundamental data structures of IPng should not be bound
- with the other elements of the protocol. E.g., things like
- address formats should not be intimately tied with the routing
- and forwarding algorithms in the way that the IPv4 address
- class mechanism was tied to IPv4 routing and forwarding.
-
- 5.13.4 Packets
- It should be possible to add additional packet-types to IPng.
- These could be for, _e._g., new control and/or monitoring
- operations.
-
- We note that, everything else being equal, having larger,
- oversized, number spaces is preferable to having number spaces
- that are "just large enough". Larger spaces afford more
- flexibility on the part of network designers and operators and
- allow for further experimentation on the part of the scientists,
- engineers, and developers. See [7].
-
- Time Frame
- A framework showing mechanisms for extending the protocol must be
- provided immediately.
-
- 5.14 Network Service
-
- CRITERION
- The protocol must allow the network (routers, intelligent media,
- hosts, and so on) to associate packets with particular service
- classes and provide them with the services specified by those
- classes.
-
-
-
-
-
- Partridge and Kastenholz [Page 22]
-
- RFC 1726 IPng Technical Criteria December 1994
-
-
- DISCUSSION
- For many reasons, such as accounting, security and multimedia, it
- is desirable to treat different packets differently in the
- network.
-
- For example, multimedia is now on our desktop and will be an
- essential part of future networking. So we have to find ways to
- support it; and a failure to support it may mean users choose to
- use protocols other than IPng.
-
- The IETF multicasts have shown that we can currently support
- multimedia over internetworks with some hitches. If the network
- can be guaranteed to provide the necessary service levels for this
- traffic, we will dramatically increase its success.
-
- This criterion includes features such as policy-based routing,
- flows, resource reservation, network service technologies, type-
- of-service and quality-of-service and so on.
-
- In order to properly support commercial provision and use of
- Internetwork service, and account for the use of these services
- (i.e., support the economic principle of "value paid for value
- received") it must be possible to obtain guarantees of service
- levels. Similarly, if the network can not support a previously
- guaranteed service level, it must report this to those to whom it
- guaranteed the service.
-
- Network service provisions must be secure. The network-layer
- security must generally prevent one host from surreptitiously
- obtaining or disrupting the use of resources which another host
- has validly acquired. (Some security failures are acceptable, but
- the failure rate must be very low and the rate should be
- quantifiable).
-
- One of the parameters of network service that may be requested
- must be cost-based.
-
- As far as possible, given the limitations of underlying media and
- IP's model of a robust internet datagram service, real-time,
- mission-critical applications must be supported by IPng [6].
-
- Users must be able to confirm that they are, in fact, getting the
- services that they have requested.
-
- Time Frame
- This should be available within 24 months.
-
-
-
-
-
- Partridge and Kastenholz [Page 23]
-
- RFC 1726 IPng Technical Criteria December 1994
-
-
- 5.15 Support for Mobility
-
- CRITERION
- The protocol must support mobile hosts, networks and
- internetworks.
-
- DISCUSSION
- Again, mobility is becoming increasingly important. Look at the
- portables that everyone is carrying. Note the strength of the
- Apple commercial showing someone automatically connecting up her
- Powerbook to her computer back in the office. There have been a
- number of pilot projects showing ways to support mobility in IPv4.
- All have some drawbacks. But like network service grades, if we
- can support mobility, IPng will have features that will encourage
- transition.
-
- We use an encompassing definition of "mobility" here. Mobility
- typically means one of two things to people: 1) Hosts that
- physically move and remain connected (via some wireless datalink)
- with sessions and transport-layer connections remaining 'open' or
- 'active' and 2) Disconnecting a host from one spot in the network,
- connecting it back in another arbitrary spot and continuing to
- work. Both forms are required.
-
- Reference [6] discusses possible future use of IP-based networks
- in the US Navy's ships, planes, and shore installations. Their
- basic model is that each ship, plane and shore installation
- represents at least one IP network. The ship- and plane-based
- networks, obviously, are mobile as these craft move around the
- world. Furthermore, most, if not all, Naval surface combatants
- carry some aircraft (at a minimum, a helicopter or two). So, not
- only must there be mobile networks (the ships that move around),
- but there must be mobile internetworks: the ships carrying the
- aircraft where each aircraft has its own network, which is
- connected to the ship's network and the whole thing is moving.
-
- There is also the requirement for dynamic mobility; a plane might
- take off from aircraft carrier A and land on carrier B so it
- obviously would want to "connect" to B's network. This situation
- might be even more complex since the plane might wish to retain
- connectivity to its "home" network; that is, the plane might
- remain connected to the ship-borne networks of both aircraft
- carriers, A and B.
-
- These requirements are not limited to just the navy. They apply
- to the civilian and commercial worlds as well. For example, in
- civil airliners, commercial cargo and passenger ships, trains,
- cars and so on.
-
-
-
- Partridge and Kastenholz [Page 24]
-
- RFC 1726 IPng Technical Criteria December 1994
-
-
- Time Frame
- The mobility algorithms are stabilizing and we would hope to see
- an IPng mobility framework within a year.
-
- 5.16 Control Protocol
-
- CRITERION
- The protocol must include elementary support for testing and
- debugging networks.
-
- DISCUSSION
- An important feature of IPv4 is the ICMP and its debugging,
- support, and control features. Specific ICMP messages that have
- proven extraordinarily useful within IPv4 are Echo Request/Reply
- (a.k.a ping), Destination Unreachable and Redirect. Functions
- similar to these should be in IPng.
-
- This criterion explicitly does not concern itself with
- configuration related messages of ICMP. We believe that these are
- adequately covered by the configuration criterion in this memo.
-
- One limitation of today's ICMP that should be fixed in IPng's
- control protocol is that more than just the IPng header plus 64
- bits of a failed datagram should be returned in the error message.
- In some situations, this is too little to carry all the critical
- protocol information that indicates why a datagram failed. At
- minimum, any IPng control protocol should return the entire IPng
- and transport headers (including options or nested headers).
-
- Time Frame
- Support for these functions is required immediately.
-
- 5.17 Private Networks
-
- CRITERION
- IPng must allow users to build private internetworks on top of the
- basic Internet Infrastructure. Both private IP-based
- internetworks and private non-IP-based (e.g., CLNP or AppleTalk)
- internetworks must be supported.
-
- DISCUSSION
- In the current Internet, these capabilities are used by the
- research community to develop new IP services and capabilities
- (e.g., the MBone) and by users to interconnect non-IP islands over
- the Internet (e.g., CLNP and DecNet use in the UK).
-
- The capability of building networks on top of the Internet have
- been shown to be useful. Private networks allow the Internet to
-
-
-
- Partridge and Kastenholz [Page 25]
-
- RFC 1726 IPng Technical Criteria December 1994
-
-
- be extended and modified in ways that 1) were not foreseen by the
- original builders and 2) do not disrupt the day-to-day operations
- of other users.
-
- We note that, today in the IPv4 Internet, tunneling is widely used
- to provide these capabilities.
-
- Finally, we note that there might not be any features that
- specifically need to be added to IPng in order to support the
- desired functions (i.e., one might treat a private network protocol
- simply as another IP client protocol, just like TCP or UDP). If
- this is the case, then IPng must not prevent these functions from
- being performed.
-
- Time Frame
- Some of these capabilities may be required to support other
- criteria (e.g., transition) and as such, the timing of the
- specifications is governed by the other criteria (e.g., immediately
- in the case of transition). Others may be produced as desired.
-
- 6. Things We Chose Not to Require
-
- This section contains items which we felt should not impact the
- choice of an IPng. Listing an item here does not mean that a
- protocol MUST NOT do something. It means that the authors do not
- believe that it matters whether the feature is in the protocol or
- not. If a protocol includes one of the items listed here, that's
- cool. If it doesn't; that's cool too. A feature might be necessary in
- order to meet some other criterion. Our point is merely that the
- feature need not be required for its own sake.
-
- 6.1 Fragmentation
-
- The technology exists for path MTU discovery. Presumably, IPng will
- continue to provide this technology. Therefore, we believe that IPng
- Fragmentation and Reassembly, as provided in IPv4, is not necessary.
- We note that fragmentation has been shown to be detrimental to
- network performance and strongly recommend that it be avoided.
-
- 6.2 IP Header Checksum
-
- There has been discussion indicating that the IP Checksum does not
- provide enough error protection to warrant its performance impact.
- The argument states that there is almost always a stronger datalink
- level CRC, and that end-to-end protection is provided by the TCP
- checksum. Therefore we believe that an IPng checksum is not required
- per-se.
-
-
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- 6.3 Firewalls
-
- Some have requested that IPng include support for firewalls. The
- authors believe that firewalls are one particular solution to the
- problem of security and, as such, do not consider that support for
- firewalls is a valid requirement for IPng. (At the same time, we
- would hope that no IPng is hostile to firewalls without offering some
- equivalent security solution).
-
- 6.4 Network Management
-
- Network Management properly is a task to be carried out by additional
- protocols and standards, such as SNMP and its MIBs. We believe that
- network management, per se, is not an attribute of the IPng protocol.
- Furthermore, network management is viewed as a support, or service,
- function. Network management should be developed to fit IPng and not
- the other way round.
-
- 6.5 Accounting
-
- We believe that accounting, like network management, must be designed
- to fit the IPng protocol, and not the other way round. Therefore,
- accounting, in and of itself, is not a requirement of IPng. However,
- there are some facets of the protocol that have been specified to
- make accounting easier, such as non-repudiation of origin under
- security, and the unique naming requirement for sorting datagrams
- into classes. Note that a parameter of network service that IPng
- must support is cost.
-
- 6.6 Routing
-
- Routing is a very critical part of the Internet. In fact, the
- Internet Engineering Task Force has a separate Area which is
- chartered to deal only with routing issues. This Area is separate
- from the more general Internet Area.
-
- We see that routing is also a critical component of IPng. There are
- several criteria, such as Scaling, Addressing, and Network Services,
- which are intimately entwined with routing. In order to stress the
- critical nature and importance of routing, we have chosen to devote a
- separate chapter to specifically enumerating some of the requirements
- and issues that IPng routing must address. All of these issues, we
- believe, fall out of the general criteria presented in the previous
- chapter.
-
-
-
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- 6.6.1 Scale
-
- First and foremost, the routing architecture must scale to support
- a very large Internet. Current expectations are for an Internet
- of about 10**9 to 10**12 networks. The routing architecture must
- be able to deal with networks of this size. Furthermore, the
- routing architecture must be able to deal with this size without
- requiring massive, global databases and algorithms. Such
- databases or algorithms would, in effect, be single points of
- failure in the architecture (which is not robust), and because of
- the nature of Internet administration (cooperative anarchy), it
- would be impossible to maintain the needed consistency.
-
- 6.6.2 Policy
-
- Networks (both transit and non-transit) must be able to set their
- own policies for the types of traffic that they will admit. The
- routing architecture must make these policies available to the
- network as a whole. Furthermore, nodes must be able to select
- routes for their traffic based on the advertised policies.
-
- 6.6.3 QOS
-
- A key element of the network service criteria is that differing
- applications wish to acquire differing grades of network service.
- It is essential that this service information be propagated around
- the network.
-
- 6.6.4 Feedback
-
- As users select specific routes over which to send their traffic,
- they must be provided feedback from the routing architecture. This
- feedback should allow the user to determine whether the desired
- routes are actually available or not, whether the desired services
- are being provided, and so forth.
-
- This would allow users to modify their service requirements or
- even change their routes, as needed.
-
- 6.6.5 Stability
-
- With the addition of additional data into the routing system
- (i.e., routes are based not only on connectivity, as in IPv4, but
- also on policies, service grades, and so on), the stability of the
- routes may suffer. We offer as evidence the early ARPANET which
- experimented with load-based routing. Routes would remain in flux,
- changing from one saturated link, to another, unused, link.
-
-
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- This must not be allowed to happen. If anything, routes should be
- even more stable under IPng's routing architecture than under the
- current architecture.
-
- 6.6.6 Multicast
-
- Multicast will be more important in IPng than it is today in IPv4.
- Multicast groups may be very large and very distributed.
- Membership in multicast groups will be very dynamic. The routing
- architecture must be able to cope with this.
-
- Furthermore, the routing architecture must be able to build
- multicast routes dynamically, based on factors such as group
- membership, member location, requested and available qualities of
- service, and so on.
-
- 7. References
-
- [1] Internet Architecture Board, "IP Version 7", Draft 8, Work in
- Progress, July, 1992.
-
- [2] Gross, P., and P. Almquist, "IESG Deliberations on Routing and
- Addressing", RFC 1380, IESG Chair, IESG Internet AD, November
- 1992.
-
- [3] Clark, D., Chapin, L., Cerf, V., Braden, R., and R. Hobby,
- "Toward the Future Internet Architecture", RFC 1287, MIT, BBN,
- CNRI, USC/Information Sciences Institute, UC Davis, December
- 1991.
-
- [4] Dave Clark's paper at SIGCOMM '88 where he pointed out that the
- design of TCP/IP was guided, in large part, by an ordered list of
- requirements.
-
- [5] Vecchi, M., "IPng Requirements: A Cable Television Industry
- Viewpoint", RFC 1686, Time Warner Cable, August 1994.
-
- [6] Green, D., Irey, P., Marlow, D. and K. O'Donoghue, "HPN Working
- Group Input to the IPng Requirements Solicitation, RFC 1679,
- NSWC-DD, August 1994.
-
- [7] Bellovin, S., "On Many Addresses per Host", RFC 1681, AT&T Bell
- Laboratories, August 1994.
-
- [8] Symington, S., Wood, D., and J. Pullen, "Modelling and Simulation
- Requirements for IPng", RFC 1667, Mitre Corporation and George
- Mason University, August 1994.
-
-
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-
- [9] Internet Architecture Board, "Report of the IAB Workshop on
- Security in the Internet Architecture, RFC 1636, IAB, June 1994.
-
- [10] Private EMAIL from Tony Li to IPNG Directorate Mailing List, 18
- April 1994 18:42:05.
-
- [11] Saltzer, J., On the Naming and Binding of Network Destinations",
- RFC 1498, M.I.T. Laboratory for Computer Science, August 1993.
-
- [12] Postel, J., "Transmission Control Protocol - DARPA Internet
- Program Protocol Specification", STD 7, RFC 793, DARPA, September
- 1981.
-
- [13] EMAIL from Robert Elz to the Big Internet mailing list,
- approximately 4 May 1994.
-
- [14] Chiappa, N., "Nimrod and IPng Technical Requirements", Work in
- Progress.
-
- 8. Security Considerations
-
- Security is not directly addressed by this memo. However, as this
- memo codifies goals for a new generation of network layer protocol,
- the security provided by such a protocol is addressed. Security has
- been raised as an issue in several of the requirements stated in this
- memo. Furthermore, a specific requirement for security has been
- made.
-
- 9. Acknowledgements
-
- The authors gratefully acknowledge the assistance and input provided
- by the many people who have reviewed and commented upon this
- document.
-
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- 10. Authors' Addresses
-
- Craig Partridge
- BBN Systems and Technologies
- 10 Moulton St.
- Cambridge, MA 02138
-
- EMail: craig@aland.bbn.com
-
-
- Frank Kastenholz
- FTP Software, Inc.
- 2 High St.
- North Andover, MA, 01845-2620 USA
-
- EMail: kasten@ftp.com
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