FIRMS – Demonstration of a Mapping System for Loc/ID Split Internet Routing in G-Lab

The interdomain routing system faces scalability and flexibility problems caused by the coupling of endpoint identifiers (EIDs) and routing locators (RLOCs) in today’s IP addresses. More scalable architectures (e.g. LISP [1]) based on the locator/identifier (Loc/ID) split paradigm are currently developed [2]. They separate addressing into two separate parts: the EID, which identifies an end system within the edge network, and the RLOC, which indicates the location of the edge network in the Internet. In LISP domains, data packets are addressed with EIDs and forwarded to an ingress tunnel router (ITR) that connects the edge network to the core Internet (see Figure 1). The ITR uses a special mapping service to obtain an RLOC for the destination EID and tunnels the packets to the egress tunnel router (ETR) with that RLOC. The ETR decapsulates the packets and forwards them to the destination. We developed the distributed EID-to-RLOC mapping service FIRMS (“Future InteRnet Mapping System”) [3], [4] that can be used with any LISP-like Loc/ID split architecture. We implemented a prototype of FIRMS that is currently running in the German-Lab (G-Lab) experimental facility [5]. In the following, we explain the FIRMS architecture and show its design features. Then we describe the implementation and its deployment in G-Lab, and finally provide technical details for the demonstration setup.