The IETF is forming a new working group to address scalability issues in the Internet’s routing system caused by companies splitting their network traffic over multiple carriers, a practice called multihoming.
The new working group will build upon a base proposal from a team of Cisco engineers to create a new tunneling mechanism that will be used by the Internet’s edge and core routers.
The new mechanism — dubbed LISP for Locator/Identifier Separation Protocol — is designed to reduce the number of entries in the routing tables stored in the core routers operated by ISPs.
LISP logically separates a block of IP addresses that a company advertises out to the global Internet via its edge routers into two functions: one for identifying the systems using the IP addresses, and the other for locating where these systems connect to the Internet. This separation allows LISP to aggregate the location information, so less of it needs to be stored in the core routers.
