Bytes from IETF 120 – A Few Routing Topics

There was, as usual, a lot of work in the area of Inter-Domain Routing at IETF 120. There is the long-standing Inter-Domain Routing (IDR) working group, looking at the specification o0f the BGP protocol and its refinements for particular deployment scenarios such as 5G networks, or certain service quality assurance,…


Routing Topics at RIPE 88

RIPE 88 was held in May 2024 at Krakow, Poland. Here’s as summary of some of the routing topics that were presented at that meeting that I found to be of interest. Bgpipe – A BGP Reverse Proxy Observing and measuring the dynamic behaviour of BGP has used a small…


BGP in 2023 – BGP Updates

The first part of this annual report looked at the size of the routing table and looked at some projections of its growth for both IPv4 and IPv6. However, the scalability of BGP as the Internet’s routing protocol is not just dependant on the number of prefixes carried in the…


BGP in 2023 – Have we reached Peak IPv4?

At the start of each year, I’ve been reporting on the behaviour of the Internet’s inter-domain routing system over the previous 12 months, looking in some detail at some metrics from the routing system that can show the essential shape and behaviour of the underlying interconnection fabric of the Internet.…


Models of Trust for the RPKI

This is a report on a feasibility study looking at an alternative trust anchor structure for the Resource Public Key Infrastructure (RPKI). Background In the early days of the Internet in the 1980’s when the Internet address plan used the Class A, B and C address structure, it appears that…


Call the Routing Police!

There was a somewhat unfortunate outage for a major communications service provider in Australia, Optus, in mid-November. It appears that one of their peer BGP networks mistakenly advertised a very large route collection to the Optus BGP network which caused the routers to malfunction in some manner. The problem was…


Notes from NANOG 89: BGP Error Handling

The original specification of the BGP routing protocol, RFC 1105, from 1989, has the following directive: “NOTIFICATION messages are sent when an error condition is detected. The BGP connection is closed shortly after sending the notification message.” Ahh, you might think, that might be a potential problem, but the directive…


IEPG at IETF 117

This is part of a personal commentary on the meetings at the July 2023 meeting of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF 117). If you want to know what was presented and the comments at the mic see the IETF 117 meeting archive. The IEPG meets for a couple of…


BGP in 2022 – BGP Updates

The first part of this report looked at the size of the routing table and looked at some projections of its growth for both IPv4 and IPv6. However, the scalability of BGP as the Internet’s routing protocol is not just dependant on the number of prefixes carried in the routing…