Site-controlled secure multi-homing and traffic engineering for IP

Abstract

Site multi-homing is an important capability in modern military networks. Resilience of a site is greatly enhanced when it has multiple upstream connections to the Global Information Grid, including the global Internet. Similarly, the ability to provide traffic engineering for a site can be important in reducing delays and packet loss over low-bandwidth and/or high-delay uplinks. Current approaches to site multi-homing and site traffic engineering (a) require assistance from a trusted network service provider; (b) inject significant additional routing information into the global Internet routing system. This approach reduces flexibility, does not scale and is a widespread concern today. The proposed Identifier-Locator Network Protocol (ILNP) offers backward compatible extensions for IPv6 to enable a site to (a) use multiple routing prefixes concurrently, without needing to advertise these more-specific site prefixes upstream to the site's service providers; (b) enables edge-site controlled traffic engineering and localised addressing, without breaking end-to-end connectivity. This feature combination provides both multi-homing and traffic engineering capabilities without any adverse impact on the routing system and does not require anything more than unicast routing capability in the provider network. ILNP enables concurrent multi-path transmission for a flow, without requiring multicast routing, to increase flow resilience to path interruptions. This technique has a secondary security benefit of reducing the risk of an adversary successfully blocking an ILNP flow via a Denial-of-Service attack on any single path or single link.