[homenet] Info about IS-IS demo from Bits N Bites Prague

Christian Franke <chris@opensourcerouting.org> Thu, 17 September 2015 04:18 UTC

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Date: Thu, 17 Sep 2015 06:17:57 +0200
From: Christian Franke <chris@opensourcerouting.org>
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Subject: [homenet] Info about IS-IS demo from Bits N Bites Prague
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Hello all,

since there have been some inquiries about different aspects of the demo
that NetDEF showed at the bits N bites in Prague, I decided to provide a
more detailed description here on the list.

We showed a home network running HNCP and two different implementations
of IS-IS interoperating with each other, at the high level the demo showed:

- IS-IS for Homenet (IPv6 & IPv4)
- Transport: both L2 & IPv6 (Link-Local)
- Point-to-Multi-Point or Broadcast over L2 or IPv6
- Dynamic IS-IS Route Metric updating based on WiFi QualityInfo about
IS-IS demo from Bits N Bites Prague
- HNCP IPv6 Prefix Delegation
- SRC / DEST Routing
- IS-IS Auto-Configuration

Both code bases implemented the following extensions on top of standard
IS-IS:

- draft-franke-isis-over-ipv6
- draft-baker-ipv6-isis-dst-src-routing
- draft-lamparter-isis-p2mp
- draft-franke-isis-over-ipv6
- dynamic metric support (see below)

For more information for the first four bullet points, please refer to
the drafts.

There is currently no draft on the dynamic metric support, since this
feature does not change the IS-IS protocol. Therefore, a short
description is following.

For the dynamic metrics support, we implemented a small daemon called
etxrd which provides metric information from the 802.11 layer. The
information is gathered using OpenWRT's libiwinfo, on our platform using
nl80211. We have a patch for libiwinfo that allows us to query the
estimated tx rate from the wifi stack, this value is suitable as a
metric for routing purposes. However that patch has not been in a
release yet, so to support running our code on the current standard
OpenWRT system, we rely on SNR as a metric for now. This provides some
information, but is suboptimal.

The daemon currently only provides metrics for the wifi side. We use a
fixed (better) metric for wired connections.

Just to clarify, that daemon is not specific to IS-IS, and it does not
need IS-IS to run. It just provides metric information about known
802.11 neighbors that can be consumed by any interested party, e.g.
other routing protocols, without requiring any modification on the
daemon side.

In our use case, IS-IS subscribes to the provided information and uses
it to adjust metrics for the neighbors. These are standard IS-IS wide
metrics, although it makes use of the per neighbor metrics available
with draft-lamparter-isis-p2mp.

Since 802.11 clients/stations only communicate with other stations via
the access point, they do only have metric information about the access
point, while the access point has information about all clients. To
address this, links without metric information (i.e. direct links
between clients) will not be considered for SPF. Since 802.11 frames
from clients to clients are relayed by the AP, this actually can reflect
the metrics better.

---

The code that was use for the demo is available at the NetDEF git. There
is a package feed for OpenWRT that allows to build images containing our
IS-IS version available here:

https://git.netdef.org/projects/OSR/repos/openwrt-isis-hnet/

Instructions for using that feed can be found in the README file.

-Christian

[homenet] Info about IS-IS demo from Bits N Bites… Christian Franke
[homenet] IS-IS metric mechanism and implementati… Mikael Abrahamsson
[homenet] Dynamic metrics in IS-IS [was: Info abo… Juliusz Chroboczek
Re: [homenet] Info about IS-IS demo from Bits N B… Juliusz Chroboczek
Re: [homenet] Dynamic metrics in IS-IS [was: Info… Henning Rogge
Re: [homenet] Info about IS-IS demo from Bits N B… Mikael Abrahamsson
Re: [homenet] Info about IS-IS demo from Bits N B… Juliusz Chroboczek
Re: [homenet] Dynamic metrics in IS-IS [was: Info… Juliusz Chroboczek
Re: [homenet] Info about IS-IS demo from Bits N B… Mikael Abrahamsson
Re: [homenet] Dynamic metrics in IS-IS [was: Info… Mikael Abrahamsson
Re: [homenet] Dynamic metrics in IS-IS [was: Info… Juliusz Chroboczek
Re: [homenet] Dynamic metrics in IS-IS [was: Info… Mikael Abrahamsson
Re: [homenet] Dynamic metrics in IS-IS [was: Info… Henning Rogge
Re: [homenet] Dynamic metrics in IS-IS [was: Info… Gabriel Kerneis
Re: [homenet] Dynamic metrics in IS-IS Juliusz Chroboczek
Re: [homenet] Dynamic metrics in IS-IS [was: Info… Gabriel Kerneis
Re: [homenet] Dynamic metrics in IS-IS Mikael Abrahamsson
Re: [homenet] Dynamic metrics in IS-IS Juliusz Chroboczek
Re: [homenet] Dynamic metrics in IS-IS Henning Rogge
Re: [homenet] Dynamic metrics in IS-IS Gabriel Kerneis
Re: [homenet] Dynamic metrics in IS-IS Juliusz Chroboczek