[Anima] KIRA – A Scalable ID-based Routing Architecture for Control Planes

["Bless, Roland (TM)" <[e-mail]>]

Hi,

I'd just like to bring KIRA to your attention that was recently published
at IFIP Networking 2022: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9829816
or if you don't have access, you can also use the preprint version here:
https://publikationen.bibliothek.kit.edu/1000148953
[sorry for similar cross-posting from rtgwg, but this time with focus on 
ANIMA use].

KIRA was designed to provide an extremely robust control plane 
connectivity,
also for in-band control, so it is a "connectivity first" protocol that 
tries to
uphold the connectivity between all its resources. In the ANIMA context, 
it could
be seen as being an alternative to RPL in the ACP. In comparison to
RPL it does not create traffic concentrations and is very robust even
in drastic failure scenarios. Moreover, it can provide a built-in
DHT which could ease the discovery of ASAs and provide lightweight
lookup services.

Some features:

  * It consists of a highly scalable ID-based routing protocol R²/Kad in
    the routing tier
      o highly scalable means 100,000s of nodes in a single domain
      o "ID-based" means that it works on flat identifiers that have no
        topological meaning, e.g., they could be hashes of public keys
        or just random numbers
  * it is a partially reactive path-vector protocol, i.e., a node
    maintains a set of routes to some destinations, whereas it needs to
    discover routes to other destinations on demand.
  * It is completely self-organized (esp. zero-touch, zero-config)
  * It is loop-free, even during convergence
  * It shows good performance in various topologies (which we call
    topological versatility), e.g., also in denser structures like data
    center topologies.
  * It achieves a good average stretch although its routing tables are
    growing with O(log n) only (n=number of existing nodes in the network)
      o Entries in the routing tables are shortest path routes
      o Stretch is configurable by a node individual adaptation
        mechanism, i.e., a node may achieve less stretch by providing
        more memory for routing table entries. For example, an ASA may
        put other ASAs it communicates frequently with into its routing
        table.
  * KIRA also provides a fast-forwarding scheme using PathIDs in the
    forwarding tier
  * R²/Kad routing protocol messages use source routing, whereas control
    packets (i.e., ACP packets) forwarded by KIRA should use less
    per-packet overhead and thus use a label-based forwarding scheme
    that also supports multi-path forwarding.
      o Currently, we use GRE encapsulation, but other methods could be
        used, e.g., IPv6 SRH.
  * The scheme currently uses IPv6 packets and ULA addresses, so it
    would fit nicely into the ANIMA work.

We think that these features would make it a great choice as an ACP 
routing protocol, however, it is clear that KIRA is nothing that has 
been standardized yet.
Besides the simulation that was used to investigate KIRA's scalability, 
we have a prototypical implementation as node-local SDN app that 
provides IPv6 connectivity between the nodes (using OpenvSwitch), a 
Linux-based native implementation is currently being developed.  If 
there is interest and agenda time available, I could try to give a brief 
overview presentation at IETF 115, however, I understand that ANIMA 
charter items have priority.

Regards,
  Roland