Evaluation of scalable routing architecture based on locator/identifier separation

It has been recognized that today's Internet routing and addressing system is facing serious scalability problems. The ever increasing network customers, multihoming, and traffic engineering, are driving the growth of Default Free Zone routing table size at an alarming rate. To solve this issue, several solutions have been proposed to separate the current single numbering space, i.e., the "IP address", into the routing locators' space and the end-systems identifiers' space. In this paper, we first review the recent locator/identifier separation proposals, and give a general classification of them according to their deployment scenarios. We then focus on evaluating the performance of the scalable routing architecture based on the locator/identifier separation. In particular, we explore the improvements that can be achieved in terms of the isolation of providers from customers, the reduction of the global routing table size, and the decrease on the number of routing updates. Furthermore, we evaluate the impact of provider changes on deploying the locator/identifier separation, and suggest that automatic allocation and configuration methods for locator-to-identifier mappings may need to be developed.