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New Internet Routing and Addressing Architecture (nimrod) Charter Status: Concluded March, 1998 Chair(s): David Bridgham Isidro Castineyra J. Noel Chiappa 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. Request for Comments: |
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