CURRENT_MEETING_REPORT_

Reported by Isidro Castineyra/Bolt Beranek and Newman

Minutes of the New Internet Routing and Addressing Architecture
Working Group (NIMROD)

The NIMROD Working Group met as a BOF in Toronto.


Introduction

The objective of this BOF is to design Nimrod:  a hierarchical,
map-based, routing architecture.  Nimrod's stated purpose is to manage
in a scalable fashion the trade-off between amount of information about
the network and route quality.

Four documents were distributed to the group before this meeting:


  1. A new architecture draft
  2. A description of Nimrod's functionality
  3. A description of Nimrod's approach to mobility, and
  4. A description of Nimrod's approach to multicast.


(They can be found on host bbn.com in directory /pub/nimrod-wg.)  The
main purpose of the meeting was to briefly present and review these
documents.


Architecture Draft

Isidro Castineyra reported on the new architecture draft.  The main
differences between this draft and the previous one are:  arcs are
always unidirectional and arcs have no attributes.  These two points
have as consequence that, between two given nodes, there can be only one
arc in each direction, and that arcs always connect different nodes.

The current architecture draft assigns locators to arcs.  The question
was raised if this was necessary, as an arc can now be identified by the
locators of the two nodes it connects.

The current draft also differs from the previous one in how connectivity
through a node is represented.  The draft specifies a ``transit
connectivity'' attribute that consists of a list of connectivity
specifications.  Each connectivity specification is qualified by a list
of the neighboring nodes between which it is valid.  This was thought to
be too complex.  An alternative suggestion was to associate with each
node one (or several) connectivity specifications which are valid
between all neighboring nodes.  More complex transit connectivity
specifications would be represented by an ``abstract'' internal map.


Nimrod Functionality

Martha Steenstrup reported on the functionality document.  This document
presents an overview of the routing functionality implied by the Nimrod
routing architecture.  The document presents a candidate set of routing
mechanisms for Nimrod, illustrating how the Nimrod architecture might be
realized.  It is intended as a stepping stone on the way to a detailed
protocol specification for Nimrod.  Questions during this presentation
were for clarification.


Mobility and Multicast in Nimrod

Ram Ramanathan presented the documents on mobility and multicast.
Neither of these documents presents a specific Nimrod approach.  They
show how different approaches, including those currently being
considered in the IETF working groups on mobility and multicast, can be
co-opted by Nimrod.  Questions during his presentation were for
clarification.


Miscellaneous

The next topic was how to approach the protocol and database
specification.  Ram Ramanathan made a brief presentation on what
protocol mechanism would be necessary.  Isidro touched briefly on the
database organization.  A suggestion to use a MIB-like approach was
discussed.  The group suggested looking at alternatives.  The group
plans to work on the protocol and database specification with the
objective being to produce Internet-Drafts on these subjects.

Noel Chiappa made a brief presentation on his document on Nimrod
requirements for IPng.