Reconsidering the Internet Routing Architecture

The current growth of the BGP routing tables [15] and Forwarding Information bases (FIB) on core routers worries several operators and vendors [21]. Another issue is the growth of the number of BGP messages that need to be processed by BGP routers [16]. This is not the first time that the Internet is confronted with such problems. The most successful solution has been the introduction of Classless Interdomain Routing (CIDR) [13]. Other solutions such as using the DNS to aid routing [14] were proposed, but not implemented. CIDR allowed to significantly reduce the growth rate of the BGP routing tables until a few years ago. Today, CIDR is not sufficient anymore due to the growth of multihomed stub ASes [1, 15]. This work in progress document is divided in two parts. In section 2, we first discuss several of the implicit assumptions of the current interdomain routing architecture. Then, in section 3, we discuss several alternatives to these assumptions and highlight some design choices.