international routing

[Daniel Long <[e-mail]>]

Not sure the relationship between tewg and fepg but this came my way and I
thought that some of you tewg folks might be interested in getting in on this
discussion.

Regards,
Dan

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Date: Wed, 28 Mar 90 15:31:11 PST
From: Jim Leighton - ESnet <[e-mail]>
To: [e-mail]
Subject: Interagency International Routing
Cc: [e-mail]

Guys:   In this brave new world of inter-agency
conviviality and joint fat-pipes, I have been giving some
thought to the question of how international routing is/will
be/should be handled.  Perhaps some of these questions have
obvious answers;  however, it would be useful to me to
understand any ground rules that may now exist.

Some questions that come to mind:

1.  Who has responsibility for advertising which foreign
routes to whom?

        a. If we bring in West German routes over the FRG fat
pipe and give them to (for example) NSFnet, can/will NSFnet
advertise those routes only to the regionals?   Or
could/would NSFnet advertise the FRG routes to, say, the
Canadians - thereby becoming a transit network for foreign
traffic.

        b. Or, say,  what if ESnet wanted to advertise a subset
of the FRG routes to those NSF regionals with which we are
peering, as well as our backbone sites.    How do we agree
as to who advertises which FRG routes to which regionals?

2.  Should the foreign country have any say about who is
responsible for advertising their routes?  If so, by what
mechanism do they specify their requirements?  For example,
what if in 1a above, the Germans do not want NSFnet to
advertise their routes to the Canadians, but they do want
Milo to advertize them to the Japanese, but not the
Australians?

3.  How do we assure ourselves that the foreign countries do
not do cleaver stuff with our routes.  E.g.  how do we
specify that the routes that we advertise over the FRG fat-
pipe do not show up on the UK fat-pipe.   Or that the
Japanese do not readvertise our routes in places we would
not like them to do so.

4. Do those who have responsibility for a fat-pipe have any
special claim on the routes being brought over/sent over the
pipe.  For example, can/does NASA claim first "rights"
to the disposition of the PACCOM routes?   What responsibility
does ESnet have for the FRG routes brought over the FRG fat-pipe?

5. Is there any agreement about the AS foreign routes should
be in?  Should they be in the AS of the coordinating agency
network?    After looking at the FRG fat-pipe, we are coming
to the opinion that the best approach to handle policy
issues is to put two ciscos at the FIX-East and to advertise
the FRG routes in one AS and our backbone routes in another
AS, from a separate cisco.

        I would appreciate hearing about any of these issues,
and any others that I have overlooked.  It seems to me that
it might be very useful  to think about developing a FIX-
agency routing plan for international traffic, just so we
have to think through some of the issues and have the
answers written down somewhere.  It is maybe easier to do
the RIGHT THING if we can agree on what the right thing is.
And possibly we could present it to other countries as a model
about how routing could/should be handled, or as a coordinated US
position about how we will handle foreign traffic.

        If there is any interest from others,  I would propose
to put this on the next FEPG agenda for discussion.

JFL

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