NOTE: This charter is accurate as of the 30th IETF Meeting in Toronto. It may now be out-of-date. (Consider this a "snapshot" of the working group from that meeting.) Up-to-date charters for all active working groups can be found elsewhere in this Web server.

New Internet Routing and Addressing Architecture (NIMROD) Charter

Chair(s)

Mailing List Information

Description of Working Group

The goal of the working group is to design, specify, implement and test a flexible new routing and addressing architecture suitable for very large scale internets. The basic architecture for computation of routes will be based on distribution of network topology maps, with source-specified route selection, and unitary (i.e., not hop-by-hop) computation of routes.

The architecture will provide a single homogeneous framework for all routing, including both inter-domain and intra-domain. It will include a new network component naming abstraction hierarchy, starting from network attachment points, and based on actual connectivity, but taking into consideration policy requirements. These new names will be variable length, with a variable number of levels of abstraction; they will not appear in most packets, though.

Actual packet forwarding will be based both on retained non-critical state in the switches (via flow setup for long-lived communications), and both classical address-only, as well as source-route type instructions, in individual packets (for datagram applications which send only one, or a very few, packets).

Although the general design and algorithms will be usable in any internetworking protocol family, the initial detailed protocol specifications and implementation are currently planned for deployment with IPv4, but support for another packet format may be substituted or added, depending on the situation in the Internet in the future. Interoperabilty with existing unmodified IPv4 hosts will be achieved by re-interpreting the existing source and destination fields in IPv4 packets as endpoint identifiers.

A substantial effort to take into account support for mobility, multicast and resource allocation will be made when designing the Nimrod architecture; provided that so doing is neither impossible because of incomplete work outside the scope of Nimrod, nor the cause of very substantial delays in the first iteration of the protocol design.

Goals and Milestones

Done
Commence project.
Jan 1994
Complete the review and discussion of the fundamentals of the routing and addressing architecture.
Feb 1994
Produce a draft architecture document, which will also serve as an in-depth introduction to Nimrod.
Jul 1994
Issue Internet-Drafts containing the design of the basic routing and addressing architecture and protocols.
Sep 1994
Produce a first version of the protocol specification, which embodies the completed basic routing and addressing architecture. Issue this document as an Internet-Draft.
Nov 1994
Finish design of all the detailed mechanisms, including sample algorithms for those parts which are outside the core specification. Issue an Internet-Draft describing these.
Dec 1994
Issue a usage guide as an Internet-Draft. This guide will describe recommended clustering strategies and configurations.
Jul 1995
Finish an initial prototype protocol implementation, suitable for experimentation within the Internet, to allow field trials.
Oct 1995
Complete an initial field trial of the prototype protocol and implementation.
Jul 1996
After assessing the performance of the protocols and sample algorithms, based on operational experience, release an updated protocol specification and sample algorithms.

Internet-Drafts

RFCs