New Internet Routing and Addressing Architecture (nimrod)
---------------------------------------------------------

 Charter
 Last Modified: 04/07/1998

 Current Status: Concluded Working Group

 Chair(s):
     J. Noel Chiappa  <jnc@lcs.mit.edu>
     Isidro Castineyra  <isidro@bbn.com>
     David Bridgham  <dab=ietf@epilogue.com>

 Routing Area Director(s):
     Bill Fenner  <fenner@research.att.com>
     Alex Zinin  <zinin@psg.com>

 Routing Area Advisor:
        <0>

 Mailing Lists: 
     General Discussion:nimrod-wg@bbn.com
     To Subscribe:      nimrod-wg-request@bbn.com
     Archive:           ftp://bbn.com/pub/nimrod-wg/nimrod-wg.archive

Description of Working Group:

The goal of the working group is to design, specify, implement and test a
flexible new routing and addressing architecture suitable for very large
scale internets.  The basic architecture for computation of routes will
be based on distribution of network topology maps, with source-specified
route selection, and unitary (i.e., not hop-by-hop) computation of routes.

The architecture will provide a single homogeneous framework for all
routing, including both inter-domain and intra-domain.  It will include a
new network component naming abstraction hierarchy, starting from network
attachment points, and based on actual connectivity, but taking into
consideration policy requirements.  These new names will be variable
length, with a variable number of levels of abstraction; they will not
appear in most packets, though.

Actual packet forwarding will be based both on retained non-critical
state in the switches (via flow setup for long-lived communications), and
both classical address-only, as well as source-route type instructions, in
individual packets (for datagram applications which send only one, or a very
few, packets).

Although the general design and algorithms will be usable in any
internetworking protocol family, the initial detailed protocol
specifications and implementation are currently planned for deployment
with IPv4, but support for another packet format may be substituted or
added, depending on the situation in the Internet in the future.
Interoperabilty with existing unmodified IPv4 hosts will be achieved by
re-interpreting the existing source and destination fields in IPv4
packets as endpoint identifiers.

A substantial effort to take into account support for mobility,
multicast and resource allocation will be made when designing the Nimrod
architecture; provided that so doing is neither impossible because of
incomplete work outside the scope of Nimrod, nor the cause of very
substantial delays in the first iteration of the protocol design.

 Goals and Milestones:

   Done         Complete the review and discussion of the fundamentals of 
                the routing and addressing architecture. 

   Done         Produce a draft architecture document, which will also 
                serve as an in-depth introduction to Nimrod. 

   Done         Issue Internet-Drafts containing the design of the basic 
                routing and addressing architecture and protocols. 

   Done         Commence project. 

   SEP 94       Produce a first version of the protocol specification, 
                which embodies the completed basic routing and addressing 
                architecture. Issue this document as an Internet-Draft. 

   NOV 94       Finish design of all the detailed mechanisms, including 
                sample algorithms for those parts which are outside the 
                core specification. Issue an Internet-Draft describing 
                these. 

   DEC 94       Issue a usage guide as an Internet-Draft. This guide will 
                describe recommended clustering strategies and 
                configurations. 

   JUL 95       Finish an initial prototype protocol implementation, 
                suitable for experimentation within the Internet, to allow 
                field trials. 

   OCT 95       Complete an initial field trial of the prototype protocol 
                and implementation. 

   JUL 96       After assessing the performance of the protocols and sample 
                algorithms, based on operational experience, release an 
                updated protocol specification and sample algorithms. 


 Internet-Drafts:

  No Current Internet-Drafts.

 Request For Comments:

  RFC   Stat Published     Title
------- -- ----------- ------------------------------------
RFC1992 I    AUG 96    The Nimrod Routing Architecture 

RFC2103 I    FEB 97    Mobility Support for Nimrod : Challenges and 
                       Solution Approaches 

RFC2102 I    FEB 97    Multicast Support for Nimrod : Requirements and 
                       Solution Approaches