Network Working Group J. Chroboczek
Internet-Draft IRIF, University of Paris-Diderot
Intended status: Informational April 7, 2018
Expires: October 9, 2018

Applicability of the Babel routing protocol
draft-ietf-babel-applicability-03

Abstract

Where we argue that, although OSPF and IS-IS are fine protocols, there exists a space where the Babel routing protocol (RFC 6126bis) is useful.

Status of This Memo

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Table of Contents

1. Introduction and background

Babel [RFC6126bis] is a routing protocol based on the familiar distance-vector algorithm (sometimes known as distributed Bellman-Ford) augmented with mechanisms for loop avoidance (there is no "counting to infinity") and starvation avoidance. In this document, we argue that there exist niches where Babel is useful and that are not adequately served by more mature protocols such as OSPF [RFC5340] and IS-IS [RFC1195].

1.1. Technical overview of the Babel protocol

At its core, Babel is a traditional distance-vector protocol based on the distributed Bellman-Ford algorithm, similar in principle to RIP [RFC2453], but with two obvious extensions: provisions for sensing of neighbour reachability, bidirectional reachability and link quality, and support for multiple address families (e.g., IPv6 and IPv4) in a single protocol instance.

Algorithms of this class are simple to understand and simple to implement, but unfortunately they do not work very well — they suffer from "counting to infinity", a case of pathologically slow convergence in some topologies after a link failure. Babel uses a mechanism pioneered by EIGRP [DUAL] [RFC7868], known as "feasibility", which avoids routing loops and therefore makes counting to infinity impossible.

Feasibility is a conservative mechanism, one that not only avoids all looping routes but also rejects some loop-free routes. Thus, it can lead to a situation known as "starvation", where a router rejects all routes to a given destination, even those that are loop-free. In order to recover from starvation, Babel uses a mechanism pioneered by DSDV [DSDV] and known as "sequenced routes". In Babel, this mechanism is generalised to deal with prefixes of arbitrary length and routes announced at multiple points in a single routing domain (DSDV was a pure mesh protocol, and only dealt with host routes).

In DSDV, the sequenced routes algorithm is slow to react to a starvation episode. In Babel, starvation recovery is accelerated by using explicit requests (known as "seqno requests" in the protocol) that signal a starvation episode and cause a new sequenced route to be propagated in a timely manner. In the absence of packet loss, this mechanism is provably complete and clears the starvation in time proportional to the diameter of the network, at the cost of some additional signalling traffic.

2. Properties of the Babel protocol

In this section, we describe the properties of the Babel protocol as well as its known limitations.

2.1. Simplicity and implementability

Babel is a conceptually simple protocol. It consists of a familiar algorithm (distributed Bellman-Ford) augmented with three simple and well-defined mechanisms (feasibility, sequenced routes and explicit requests). Given a sufficiently friendly audience, the principles behind Babel can be explained in 15 minutes, and a full description of the protocol can be done in 52 minutes (one microcentury).

An important consequence is that Babel is easy to implement. While Babel is a young protocol, there exist four independent implementations, including one that was reportedly written and debugged in just two nights.

2.2. Robustness

The fairly strong properties of the Babel protocol (convergence, loop avoidance, starvation avoidance) rely on some rather weak properties of the network and the metric being used. The most significant are: [RFC5340] or IS-IS [RFC1195], which are layered over a reliable flooding algorithm and make stronger requirements on the underlying network and metric.

In particular, Babel does not assume a reliable transport, it does not assume ordered delivery, it does not assume that communication is transitive, and it does not require that the metric be discrete (continuous metrics are possible, reflecting for example packet loss rates). This is in contrast to traditional link-state routing protocols such as OSPF

These weak requirements make Babel a robust protocol:

These robustness properties have important consequences for the applicability of the protocol: Babel works (more or less efficiently) in a wide range of circumstances where traditional routing protocols give up.

2.3. Extensibility

Babel's packet format has a number of features that make the protocol extensible (see Appendix C of [RFC6126bis]), and a number of extensions have been designed to make Babel work better in situations that were not envisioned when the protocol was initially designed. The ease of extensibility is not an accident, but a consequence of the design of the protocol: it is reasonably easy to check whether a given extension violates the assumptions on which Babel relies.

Remarkably enough, all of the extensions designed to date interoperate with the base protocol and with each other. This, again, is a consequence of the protocol design: in order to check the interoperability of two implementations of Babel, it is enough to verify that the interaction of the two does not violate the protocol's assumptions.

Notable extensions deployed to date include:

Some other extensions have been designed, but have not seen deployment yet (and their usefulness is yet to be demonstrated):

2.4. Limitations

Babel has some undesirable properties that make it suboptimal or even unusable in some deployments.

2.4.1. Periodic updates

The main mechanisms used by Babel to reconverge after a topology change are reactive: triggered updates, triggered retractions and explicit requests. However, in the presence of heavy packet loss, Babel relies on periodic updates to clear pathologies. This reliance on periodic updates makes Babel unsuitable in at least two kinds of deployments:

2.4.2. Full routing table

While there exist techniques that allow a Babel speaker to function with a partial routing table (e.g., by learning just a default route or, more generally, performing route aggregation), Babel is designed around the assumption that every router has a full routing table. In networks where some nodes are too constrained to hold a full routing table, it might be preferable to use a protocol that was designed from the outset to work with a partial routing table (such as AODVv2 [AODVv2], RPL [RFC6550] or LOADng [LOADng]).

2.4.3. Slow aggregation

Babel's loop-avoidance mechanism relies on making a route unreachable after a retraction until all neighbours have been guaranteed to have acted upon the retraction, even in the presence of packet loss. Unless the optional algorithm described in Section 3.5.5 of [RFC6126bis] is implemented, this entails that a node is unreachable for a few minutes after the most specific route to it has been retracted. This delay may make Babel slow to recover from a topology change in networks that perform automatic route aggregation.

3. Successful deployments of Babel

In this section, we give a few examples of environments where Babel has been successfully deployed.

3.1. Hybrid networks

Babel is able to deal with both classical, prefix-based ("Internet-style") routing and flat ("mesh-style") routing over non-transitive link technologies. Because of that, it has seen a number of succesful deployments in medium-sized hybrid networks, networks that combine a wired, aggregated backbone with meshy wireless bits at the edges. No other routing protocol known to us is similarly robust and efficient in this particular kind of topology.

Efficient operation in hybrid networks requires the implementation to distinguish wired and wireless links, and to perform link quality estimation on wireless links.

3.2. Large scale overlay networks

The algorithms used by Babel (loop avoidance, hysteresis, delayed updates) allow it to remain stable and efficient in the presence of unstable metrics, even in the presence of a feedback loop. For this reason, it has been successfully deployed in large scale overlay networks, built out of thousands of tunnels spanning continents, where it is used with a metric computed from links' latencies.

This particular application depends on the extension for RTT-sensitive routing [DELAY-BASED].

3.3. Pure mesh networks

While Babel is a general-purpose routing protocol, it has been repeatedly shown to be competitive with dedicated routing protocols for wireless mesh networks [REAL-WORLD] [BRIDGING-LAYERS]. Although this particular niche is already served by a number of mature protocols, notably OLSR-ETX and OLSRv2 [RFC7181] (equipped e.g. with the DAT metric [RFC7779]), Babel has seen a moderate amount of successful deployment in pure mesh networks.

3.4. Small unmanaged networks

Because of its small size and simple configuration, Babel has been deployed in small, unmanaged networks (e.g., home and small office networks), where it serves as a more efficient replacement for RIP [RFC2453], over which it has two significant advantages: the ability to route multiple address families (IPv6 and IPv4) in a single protocol instance, and good support for using wireless links for transit.

4. IANA Considerations

This document requires no IANA actions. [RFC Editor: please remove this section before publication.]

5. Security Considerations

As is the case in all distance-vector routing protocols, a Babel speaker receives reachability information from its neighbours, which by default is trusted. A number of attacks are possible if this information is not suitably protected, either by a lower-layer mechanism or by an extension to the protocol itself (e.g. [RFC7298]).

Implementors and deployers must be aware of the insecure nature of the base protocol, and must take suitable measures to ensure that the protocol is deployed as securely as required by the application.

6. Informational References

[AODVv2] Perkins, C., Ratliff, S., Dowdell, J., Steenbrink, L. and V. Mercieca, "Ad Hoc On-demand Distance Vector Version 2 (AODVv2) Routing", Internet-Draft draft-ietf-manet-aodvv2-16, May 2016.
[BABEL-RTT] Jonglez, B. and J. Chroboczek, "Delay-based Metric Extension for the Babel Routing Protocol", Internet-Draft draft-jonglez-babel-rtt-extension-01, May 2015.
[BABEL-SS] Boutier, M. and J. Chroboczek, "Source-Specific Routing in Babel", Internet-Draft draft-ietf-babel-source-specific-03, August 2018.
[BABEL-TOS] Chouasne, G. and J. Chroboczek, "TOS-Specific Routing in Babel", Internet-Draft draft-chouasne-babel-tos-specific-00, July 2017.
[BABEL-Z] Chroboczek, J., "Diversity Routing for the Babel Routing Protocol", Internet-Draft draft-chroboczek-babel-diversity-routing-01, February 2016.
[BRIDGING-LAYERS] Murray, D., Dixon, M. and T. Koziniec, "An Experimental Comparison of Routing Protocols in Multi Hop Ad Hoc Networks", Proc. ATNAC 2010, 2010.
[DELAY-BASED] Jonglez, B. and J. Chroboczek, "A delay-based routing metric", March 2014.
[DSDV] Perkins, C. and P. Bhagwat, "Highly Dynamic Destination-Sequenced Distance-Vector Routing (DSDV) for Mobile Computers", ACM SIGCOMM'94 Conference on Communications Architectures, Protocols and Applications 234-244, 1994.
[DUAL] Garcia Luna Aceves, J., "Loop-Free Routing Using Diffusing Computations", IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking 1:1, February 1993.
[LOADng] Clausen, T., Verdiere, A., Yi, J., Niktash, A., Igarashi, Y., Satoh, H., Herberg, U., Lavenu, C., Lys, T. and J. Dean, "The Lightweight On-demand Ad hoc Distance-vector Routing Protocol - Next Generation (LOADng)", Internet-Draft draft-clausen-lln-loadng-15, January 2017.
[REAL-WORLD] Abolhasan, M., Hagelstein, B. and J. Wang, "Real-world performance of current proactive multi-hop mesh protocols", Asia-Pacific Conference on Communication 2009, 2009.
[RFC1195] Callon, R., "Use of OSI IS-IS for routing in TCP/IP and dual environments", RFC 1195, December 1990.
[RFC2453] Malkin, G., "RIP Version 2", STD 56, RFC 2453, November 1998.
[RFC5340] Coltun, R., Ferguson, D., Moy, J. and A. Lindem, "OSPF for IPv6", RFC 5340, July 2008.
[RFC6126bis] Chroboczek, J. and D. Schinazi, "The Babel Routing Protocol", Internet Draft draft-ietf-babel-rfc6126bis-04, October 2017.
[RFC6550] Winter, T., Thubert, P., Brandt, A., Hui, J., Kelsey, R., Levis, P., Pister, K., Struik, R., Vasseur, JP. and R. Alexander, "RPL: IPv6 Routing Protocol for Low-Power and Lossy Networks", RFC 6550, March 2012.
[RFC7181] Clausen, T., Dearlove, C., Jacquet, P. and U. Herberg, "The Optimized Link State Routing Protocol Version 2", RFC 7181, April 2014.
[RFC7298] Ovsienko, D., "Babel Hashed Message Authentication Code (HMAC) Cryptographic Authentication", RFC 7298, DOI 10.17487/RFC7298, July 2014.
[RFC7779] Rogge, H. and E. Baccelli, "Directional Airtime Metric Based on Packet Sequence Numbers for Optimized Link State Routing Version 2 (OLSRv2)", RFC 7779, DOI 10.17487/RFC7779, April 2016.
[RFC7868] Savage, D., Ng, J., Moore, S., Slice, D., Paluch, P. and R. White, "Cisco's Enhanced Interior Gateway Routing Protocol (EIGRP)", RFC 7868, DOI 10.17487/RFC7868, May 2016.
[SS-ROUTING] Boutier, M. and J. Chroboczek, "Source-Specific Routing", August 2014.

In Proc. IFIP Networking 2015.

Author's Address

Juliusz Chroboczek IRIF, University of Paris-Diderot Case 7014 75205 Paris Cedex 13, France EMail: jch@irif.fr