[secdir] [new-work] WG Review: Routing In Fat Trees (rift)

[The IESG <[e-mail]>]

A new IETF WG has been proposed in the Routing Area. The IESG has not made
any determination yet. The following draft charter was submitted, and is
provided for informational purposes only. Please send your comments to the
IESG mailing list ([e-mail]) by 2018-02-05.

Routing In Fat Trees (rift)
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Current status: Proposed WG

Chairs:
  Zhaohui Zhang <[e-mail]>

Assigned Area Director:
  Alvaro Retana <[e-mail]>

Routing Area Directors:
  Alia Atlas <[e-mail]>
  Alvaro Retana <[e-mail]>
  Deborah Brungard <[e-mail]>

Mailing list:
  Address: [e-mail]
  To subscribe: https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/rift
  Archive: https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/search/?email_list=rift

Group page: https://datatracker.ietf.org/group/rift/

Charter: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/charter-ietf-rift/

Data Centers have been steadily growing to commonly host tens of thousands
of end points, or more, in a single network.  Because of their topologies
(traditional and emerging), traffic patterns, need for fast restoration,
and for low human intervention, data center networks have a unique set of
requirements that is resulting in the design of routing solutions specific
to them.  Clos and Fat-Tree topologies have gained popularity in data center
networks as a result of a trend towards centralized data center network
architectures that may deliver computation and storage services.

The Routing in Fat Trees (RIFT) protocol addresses the demands of routing in
Clos and Fat-Tree networks via a mixture of both link-state and
distance-vector techniques colloquially described as 'link-state towards the
spine and distance vector towards the leafs'.  RIFT uses this hybrid approach
to focus on networks with regular topologies with a high degree of
connectivity, a defined directionality, and large scale.

The RIFT Working Group will work on a standards track specification of a
specialized, dynamic routing protocol for Clos and fat-tree network
topologies. The protocol will:

 - deal with automatic construction of fat-tree topologies based on detection
 of links,

 - minimize the amount of routing state held at each topology level,

 - automatically prune topology distribution exchanges to a sufficient subset
 of links,

 - support automatic disaggregation of prefixes on link and node failures to
 prevent black-holing and suboptimal routing,

 - allow traffic steering and re-routing policies,

 - and provide mechanisms to synchronize a limited key-value data-store that
 can be used after protocol convergence.

It is important that nodes participating in the protocol should need only
very light configuration and should be able to join a network as leaf nodes
simply by connecting to the network using default configuration.

The protocol must support IPv6 and should also support IPv4.

The Working Group may establish additional requirements to constrain and
inform their work.

The RIFT Working Group is chartered for the following list of items:

 - A Standards Track specification that will include:
   - an Implementation Status section as described in RFC 7942
   - an Operational Considerations section to explain how the protocol is
   configured, deployed, and diagnosed - Security and Privacy Considerations,
   although this material may refer to a separate Threat Analysis document
   (q.v.)

 - A YANG module focused on configuration and monitoring of protocol instances

 - An Applicability Statement that describes how to deploy and configure the
 protocol in networks with different topologies

 - A Security Threat Analysis document that describes the attack vectors and
 mitigations that shall be sent for publication at the same time as the
 protocol specification

Milestones

Mar 2018 Adopt a protocol specification document
Feb 2019 Submit protocol specification to IESG for publication
Feb 2019 Submit Threat Analysis to IESG for publication
Apr 2019 Submit YANG module to IESG for publication
Apr 2019 Submit Applicability Statement to IESG for publication


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