Tech-invite3GPPspaceIETFspace
96959493929190898887868584838281807978777675747372717069686766656463626160595857565554535251504948474645444342414039383736353433323130292827262524232221201918171615141312111009080706050403020100
in Index   Prev   Next

RFC 1009

Requirements for Internet gateways

Pages: 54
Obsoletes:  0985
Obsoleted by:  1812
Part 1 of 2 – Pages 1 to 24
None   None   Next

ToP   noToC   RFC1009 - Page 1
Network Working Group                                          R. Braden
Request for Comments: 1009                                     J. Postel
Obsoletes: 985                                                       ISI
                                                               June 1987

                   Requirements for Internet Gateways


Status of this Memo

   This document is a formal statement of the requirements to be met by
   gateways used in the Internet system.  As such, it is an official
   specification for the Internet community.  Distribution of this memo
   is unlimited.

   This RFC summarizes the requirements for gateways to be used between
   networks supporting the Internet protocols.  While it was written
   specifically to support National Science Foundation research
   programs, the requirements are stated in a general context and are
   applicable throughout the Internet community.

   The purpose of this document is to present guidance for vendors
   offering gateway products that might be used or adapted for use in an
   Internet application.  It enumerates the protocols required and gives
   references to RFCs and other documents describing the current
   specifications.  In a number of cases the specifications are evolving
   and may contain ambiguous or incomplete information.  In these cases
   further discussion giving specific guidance is included in this
   document.  Specific policy issues relevant to the NSF scientific
   networking community are summarized in an Appendix.  As other
   specifications are updated this document will be revised.  Vendors
   are encouraged to maintain contact with the Internet research
   community.

1.  Introduction

   The following material is intended as an introduction and background
   for those unfamiliar with the Internet architecture and the Internet
   gateway model.  General background and discussion on the Internet
   architecture and supporting protocol suite can be found in the DDN
   Protocol Handbook [25] and ARPANET Information Brochure [26], see
   also [19, 28, 30, 31].

   The Internet protocol architecture was originally developed under
   DARPA sponsorship to meet both military and civilian communication
   requirements [32].  The Internet system presently supports a variety
   of government and government-sponsored operational and research
   activities.  In particular, the National Science Foundation (NSF) is
   building a major extension to the Internet to provide user access to
ToP   noToC   RFC1009 - Page 2
   national supercomputer centers and other national scientific
   resources, and to provide a computer networking capability to a large
   number of universities and colleges.

   In this document there are many terms that may be obscure to one
   unfamiliar with the Internet protocols.  There is not much to be done
   about that but to learn, so dive in.  There are a few terms that are
   much abused in general discussion but are carefully and intentionally
   used in this document.  These few terms are defined here.

      Packet      A packet is the unit of transmission on a physical
                  network.

      Datagram    A datagram is the unit of transmission in the IP
                  protocol.  To cross a particular network a datagram is
                  encapsulated inside a packet.

      Router      A router is a switch that receives data transmission
                  units from input interfaces and, depending on the
                  addresses in those units, routes them to the
                  appropriate output interfaces.  There can be routers
                  at different levels of protocol.  For example,
                  Interface Message Processors (IMPs) are packet-level
                  routers.

      Gateway     In the Internet documentation generally, and in this
                  document specifically, a gateway is an IP-level
                  router.  In the Internet community the term has a long
                  history of this usage [32].

   1.1.  The DARPA Internet Architecture

      1.1.1.  Internet Protocols

         The Internet system consists of a number of interconnected
         packet networks supporting communication among host computers
         using the Internet protocols.  These protocols include the
         Internet Protocol (IP), the Internet Control Message Protocol
         (ICMP), the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP), and
         application protocols depending upon them [22].

         All Internet protocols use IP as the basic data transport
         mechanism.  IP [1,31] is a datagram, or connectionless,
         internetwork service and includes provision for addressing,
         type-of-service specification, fragmentation and reassembly,
         and security information.  ICMP [2] is considered an integral
ToP   noToC   RFC1009 - Page 3
         part of IP, although it is architecturally layered upon IP.
         ICMP provides error reporting, flow control and first-hop
         gateway redirection.

         Reliable data delivery is provided in the Internet protocol
         suite by transport-level protocols such as the Transmission
         Control Protocol (TCP), which provides end-end retransmission,
         resequencing and connection control.  Transport-level
         connectionless service is provided by the User Datagram
         Protocol (UDP).

      1.1.2.  Networks and Gateways

         The constituent networks of the Internet system are required
         only to provide packet (connectionless) transport.  This
         requires only delivery of individual packets.  According to the
         IP service specification, datagrams can be delivered out of
         order, be lost or duplicated and/or contain errors.  Reasonable
         performance of the protocols that use IP (e.g., TCP) requires
         an IP datagram loss rate of less than 5%.  In those networks
         providing connection-oriented service, the extra reliability
         provided by virtual circuits enhances the end-end robustness of
         the system, but is not necessary for Internet operation.

         Constituent networks may generally be divided into two classes:

         *  Local-Area Networks (LANs)

            LANs may have a variety of designs, typically based upon
            buss, ring, or star topologies.  In general, a LAN will
            cover a small geographical area (e.g., a single building or
            plant site) and provide high bandwidth with low delays.

         *  Wide-Area Networks (WANs)

            Geographically-dispersed hosts and LANs are interconnected
            by wide-area networks, also called long-haul networks.
            These networks may have a complex internal structure of
            lines and packet-routers (typified by ARPANET), or they may
            be as simple as point-to-point lines.

         In the Internet model, constituent networks are connected
         together by IP datagram forwarders which are called "gateways"
         or "IP routers".  In this document, every use of the term
         "gateway" is equivalent to "IP router".  In current practice,
         gateways are normally realized with packet-switching software
ToP   noToC   RFC1009 - Page 4
         executing on a general-purpose CPU, but special-purpose
         hardware may also be used (and may be required for future
         higher-throughput gateways).

         A gateway is connected to two or more networks, appearing to
         each of these networks as a connected host.  Thus, it has a
         physical interface and an IP address on each of the connected
         networks.  Forwarding an IP datagram generally requires the
         gateway to choose the address of the next-hop gateway or (for
         the final hop) the destination host.  This choice, called
         "routing", depends upon a routing data-base within the gateway.
         This routing data-base should be maintained dynamically to
         reflect the current topology of the Internet system; a gateway
         normally accomplishes this by participating in distributed
         routing and reachability algorithms with other gateways.
         Gateways provide datagram transport only, and they seek to
         minimize the state information necessary to sustain this
         service in the interest of routing flexibility and robustness.

         Routing devices may also operate at the network level; in this
         memo we will call such devices MAC routers (informally called
         "level-2 routers", and also called "bridges").  The name
         derives from the fact that MAC routers base their routing
         decision on the addresses in the MAC headers; e.g., in IEEE
         802.3 networks, a MAC router bases its decision on the 48-bit
         addresses in the MAC header.  Network segments which are
         connected by MAC routers share the same IP network number,
         i.e., they logically form a single IP network.

         Another variation on the simple model of networks connected
         with gateways sometimes occurs: a set of gateways may be
         interconnected with only serial lines, to effectively form a
         network in which the routing is performed at the internetwork
         (IP) level rather than the network level.

      1.1.3.  Autonomous Systems

         For technical, managerial, and sometimes political reasons, the
         gateways of the Internet system are grouped into collections
         called "autonomous systems" [35].  The gateways included in a
         single autonomous system (AS) are expected to:

            *  Be under the control of a single operations and
               maintenance (O&M) organization;

            *  Employ common routing protocols among themselves, to
               maintain their routing data-bases dynamically.
ToP   noToC   RFC1009 - Page 5
         A number of different dynamic routing protocols have been
         developed (see Section 4.1); the particular choice of routing
         protocol within a single AS is generically called an interior
         gateway protocol or IGP.

         An IP datagram may have to traverse the gateways of two or more
         ASs to reach its destination, and the ASs must provide each
         other with topology information to allow such forwarding.  The
         Exterior Gateway Protocol (EGP) is used for this purpose,
         between gateways of different autonomous systems.

      1.1.4.  Addresses and Subnets

         An IP datagram carries 32-bit source and destination addresses,
         each of which is partitioned into two parts -- a constituent
         network number and a host number on that network.
         Symbolically:

            IP-address ::=  { <Network-number>,  <Host-number> }

         To finally deliver the datagram, the last gateway in its path
         must map the host-number (or "rest") part of an IP address into
         the physical address of a host connection to the constituent
         network.

         This simple notion has been extended by the concept of
         "subnets", which were introduced in order to allow arbitrary
         complexity of interconnected LAN structures within an
         organization, while insulating the Internet system against
         explosive growth in network numbers and routing complexity.
         Subnets essentially provide a two-level hierarchical routing
         structure for the Internet system.  The subnet extension,
         described in RFC-950 [21], is now a required part of the
         Internet architecture.  The basic idea is to partition the
         <host number> field into two parts: a subnet number, and a true
         host number on that subnet.

            IP-address ::=
                    { <Network-number>, <Subnet-number>, <Host-number> }

         The interconnected LANs of an organization will be given the
         same network number but different subnet numbers.  The
         distinction between the subnets of such a subnetted network
         must not be visible outside that network.  Thus, wide-area
         routing in the rest of the Internet will be based only upon the
         <Network-number> part of the IP destination address; gateways
         outside the network will lump <Subnet-number> and <Host-number>
ToP   noToC   RFC1009 - Page 6
         together to form an uninterpreted "rest" part of the 32-bit IP
         address.  Within the subnetted network, the local gateways must
         route on the basis of an extended network number:

            { <Network-number>, <Subnet-number> }.

         The bit positions containing this extended network number are
         indicated by a 32-bit mask called the "subnet mask" [21]; it is
         recommended but not required that the <Subnet-number> bits be
         contiguous and fall between the <Network-number> and the
         <Host-number> fields.  No subnet should be assigned the value
         zero or -1 (all one bits).

         Flexible use of the available address space will be
         increasingly important in coping with the anticipated growth of
         the Internet.  Thus, we allow a particular subnetted network to
         use more than one subnet mask.  Several campuses with very
         large LAN configurations are also creating nested hierarchies
         of subnets, sub-subnets, etc.

         There are special considerations for the gateway when a
         connected network provides a broadcast or multicast capability;
         these will be discussed later.

   1.2.  The Internet Gateway Model

      There are two basic models for interconnecting local-area networks
      and wide-area (or long-haul) networks in the Internet.  In the
      first, the local-area network is assigned a network number and all
      gateways in the Internet must know how to route to that network.
      In the second, the local-area network shares (a small part of) the
      address space of the wide-area network.  Gateways that support
      this second model are called "address sharing gateways" or
      "transparent gateways".  The focus of this memo is on gateways
      that support the first model, but this is not intended to exclude
      the use of transparent gateways.

      1.2.1.  Internet Gateways

         An Internet gateway is an IP-level router that performs the
         following functions:

            1.  Conforms to specific Internet protocols specified in
                this document, including the Internet Protocol (IP),
                Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP), and others as
                necessary.  See Section 2 (Protocols Required).

            2.  Interfaces to two or more packet networks.  For each
ToP   noToC   RFC1009 - Page 7
                connected network the gateway must implement the
                functions required by that network.  These functions
                typically include:

               a.  encapsulating and decapsulating the IP datagrams with
                   the connected network framing (e.g., an Ethernet
                   header and checksum);

               b.  sending and receiving IP datagrams up to the maximum
                   size supported by that network, this size is the
                   network's "Maximum Transmission Unit" or "MTU";

               c.  translating the IP destination address into an
                   appropriate network-level address for the connected
                   network (e.g., an Ethernet hardware address);

               d.  responding to the network flow control and error
                   indication, if any.

               See Section 3 (Constituent Network Interface), for
               details on particular constituent network interfaces.

            3.  Receives and forwards Internet datagrams.  Important
                issues are buffer management, congestion control, and
                fairness.  See Section 4 (Gateway Algorithms).

               a.  Recognizes various error conditions and generates
                   ICMP error and information messages as required.

               b.  Drops datagrams whose time-to-live fields have
                   reached zero.

               c.  Fragments datagrams when necessary to fit into the
                   MTU of the next network.

            4.  Chooses a next-hop destination for each IP datagram,
                based on the information in its routing data-base.  See
                Section 4 (Gateway Algorithms).

            5.  Supports an interior gateway protocol (IGP) to carry out
                distributed routing and reachability algorithms with the
                other gateways in the same autonomous system.  In
                addition, some gateways will need to support the
                Exterior Gateway Protocol (EGP) to exchange topological
                information with other autonomous systems.  See
                Section 4 (Gateway Algorithms).
ToP   noToC   RFC1009 - Page 8
            6.  Provides system support facilities, including loading,
                debugging, status reporting, exception reporting and
                control.  See Section 5 (Operation and Maintenance).

      1.2.2.  Embedded Gateways

         A gateway may be a stand-alone computer system, dedicated to
         its IP router functions.  Alternatively, it is possible to
         embed gateway functionality within a host operating system
         which supports connections to two or more networks.  The
         best-known example of an operating system with embedded gateway
         code is the Berkeley BSD system.  The embedded gateway feature
         seems to make internetting easy, but it has a number of hidden
         pitfalls:

            1.  If a host has only a single constituent-network
                interface, it should not act as a gateway.

                For example, hosts with embedded gateway code that
                gratuitously forward broadcast packets or datagrams on
                the same net often cause packet avalanches.

            2.  If a (multihomed) host acts as a gateway, it must
                implement ALL the relevant gateway requirements
                contained in this document.

                For example, the routing protocol issues (see Sections
                2.6 and 4.1) and the control and monitoring problems are
                as hard and important for embedded gateways as for
                stand-alone gateways.

                   Since Internet gateway requirements and
                   specifications may change independently of operating
                   system changes, an administration that operates an
                   embedded gateway in the Internet is strongly advised
                   to have an ability to maintain and update the gateway
                   code (e.g., this might require gateway code source).

            3.  Once a host runs embedded gateway code, it becomes part
                of the Internet system.  Thus, errors in software or
                configuration of such a host can hinder communication
                between other hosts.  As a consequence, the host
                administrator must lose some autonomy.

                In many circumstances, a host administrator will need to
                disable gateway coded embedded in the operating system,
                and any embedded gateway code must be organized so it
                can be easily disabled.
ToP   noToC   RFC1009 - Page 9
            4.  If a host running embedded gateway code is concurrently
                used for other services, the O&M (operation and
                maintenance) requirements for the two modes of use may
                be in serious conflict.

                For example, gateway O&M will in many cases be performed
                remotely by an operations center; this may require
                privileged system access which the host administrator
                would not normally want to distribute.

      1.2.3.  Transparent Gateways

         The basic idea of a transparent gateway is that the hosts on
         the local-area network behind such a gateway share the address
         space of the wide-area network in front of the gateway.  In
         certain situations this is a very useful approach and the
         limitations do not present significant drawbacks.

         The words "in front" and "behind" indicate one of the
         limitations of this approach: this model of interconnection is
         suitable only for a geographically (and topologically) limited
         stub environment.  It requires that there be some form of
         logical addressing in the network level addressing of the
         wide-area network (that is, all the IP addresses in the local
         environment map to a few (usually one) physical address in the
         wide-area network, in a way consistent with the { IP address
         <-> network address } mapping used throughout the wide-area
         network).

         Multihoming is possible on one wide-area network, but may
         present routing problems if the interfaces are geographically
         or topologically separated.  Multihoming on two (or more)
         wide-area networks is a problem due to the confusion of
         addresses.

         The behavior that hosts see from other hosts in what is
         apparently the same network may differ if the transparent
         gateway cannot fully emulate the normal wide-area network
         service.  For example, if there were a transparent gateway
         between the ARPANET and an Ethernet, a remote host would not
         receive a Destination Dead message [3] if it sent a datagram to
         an Ethernet host that was powered off.
ToP   noToC   RFC1009 - Page 10
   1.3.  Gateway Characteristics

      Every Internet gateway must perform the functions listed above.
      However, a vendor will have many choices on power, complexity, and
      features for a particular gateway product.  It may be helpful to
      observe that the Internet system is neither homogeneous nor
      fully-connected.  For reasons of technology and geography, it is
      growing into a global-interconnect system plus a "fringe" of LANs
      around the "edge".

         *  The global-interconnect system is comprised of a number of
            wide-area networks to which are attached gateways of several
            ASs; there are relatively few hosts connected directly to
            it.  The global-interconnect system includes the ARPANET,
            the NSFNET "backbone", the various NSF regional and
            consortium networks, other ARPA sponsored networks such as
            the SATNET and the WBNET, and the DCA sponsored MILNET.  It
            is anticipated that additional networks sponsored by these
            and other agencies (such as NASA and DOE) will join the
            global-interconnect system.

         *  Most hosts are connected to LANs, and many organizations
            have clusters of LANs interconnected by local gateways.
            Each such cluster is connected by gateways at one or more
            points into the global-interconnect system.  If it is
            connected at only one point, a LAN is known as a "stub"
            network.

      Gateways in the global-interconnect system generally require:

         *  Advanced routing and forwarding algorithms

            These gateways need routing algorithms which are highly
            dynamic and also offer type-of-service routing.  Congestion
            is still not a completely resolved issue [24].  Improvements
            to the current situation will be implemented soon, as the
            research community is actively working on these issues.

         *  High availability

            These gateways need to be highly reliable, providing 24 hour
            a day, 7 days a week service.  In case of failure, they must
            recover quickly.

         *  Advanced O&M features

            These gateways will typically be operated remotely from a
            regional or national monitoring center.  In their
ToP   noToC   RFC1009 - Page 11
            interconnect role, they will need to provide sophisticated
            means for monitoring and measuring traffic and other events
            and for diagnosing faults.

         *  High performance

            Although long-haul lines in the Internet today are most
            frequently 56 Kbps, DS1 lines (1.5 Mbps) are of increasing
            importance, and even higher speeds are likely in the future.
            Full-duplex operation is provided at any of these speeds.

            The average size of Internet datagrams is rather small, of
            the order of 100 bytes.  At DS1 line speeds, the
            per-datagram processing capability of the gateways, rather
            than the line speed, is likely to be the bottleneck.  To
            fill a DS1 line with average-sized Internet datagrams, a
            gateway would need to pass -- receive, route, and send --
            2,000 datagrams per second per interface.  That is, a
            gateway which supported 3 DS1 lines and and Ethernet
            interface would need to be able to pass a dazzling 2,000
            datagrams per second in each direction on each of the
            interfaces, or a aggregate throughput of 8,000 datagrams per
            second, in order to fully utilize DS1 lines.  This is beyond
            the capability of current gateways.

               Note: some vendors count input and output operations
               separately in datagrams per second figures; for these
               vendors, the above example would imply 16,000 datagrams
               per second !

      Gateways used in the "LAN fringe" (e.g., campus networks) will
      generally have to meet less stringent requirements for
      performance, availability, and maintenance.  These may be high or
      medium-performance devices, probably competitively procured from
      several different vendors and operated by an internal organization
      (e.g., a campus computing center).  The design of these gateways
      should emphasize low average delay and good burst performance,
      together with delay and type-of-service sensitive resource
      management.  In this environment, there will be less formal O&M,
      more hand-crafted static configurations for special cases, and
      more need for inter-operation with gateways of other vendors.  The
      routing mechanism will need to be very flexible, but need not be
      so highly dynamic as in the global-interconnect system.

      It is important to realize that Internet gateways normally operate
      in an unattended mode, but that equipment and software faults can
      have a wide-spread (sometimes global) effect.  In any environment,
ToP   noToC   RFC1009 - Page 12
      a gateway must be highly robust and able to operate, possibly in a
      degraded state, under conditions of extreme congestion or failure
      of network resources.

      Even though the Internet system is not fully-interconnected, many
      parts of the system do need to have redundant connectivity.  A
      rich connectivity allows reliable service despite failures of
      communication lines and gateways, and it can also improve service
      by shortening Internet paths and by providing additional capacity.
      The engineering tradeoff between cost and reliability must be made
      for each component of the Internet system.
ToP   noToC   RFC1009 - Page 13
2.  Protocols Required in Gateways

   The Internet architecture uses datagram gateways to interconnect
   constituent networks.  This section describes the various protocols
   which a gateway needs to implement.

   2.1.  Internet Protocol (IP)

      IP is the basic datagram protocol used in the Internet system [19,
      31].  It is described in RFC-791 [1] and also in MIL-STD-1777 [5]
      as clarified by RFC-963 [36] ([1] and [5] are intended to describe
      the same standard, but in quite different words).  The subnet
      extension is described in RFC-950 [21].

      With respect to current gateway requirements the following IP
      features can be ignored, although they may be required in the
      future:  Type of Service field, Security option, and Stream ID
      option.  However, if recognized, the interpretation of these
      quantities must conform to the standard specification.

      It is important for gateways to implement both the Loose and
      Strict Source Route options.  The Record Route and Timestamp
      options are useful diagnostic tools and must be supported in all
      gateways.

      The Internet model requires that a gateway be able to fragment
      datagrams as necessary to match the MTU of the network to which
      they are being forwarded, but reassembly of fragmented datagrams
      is generally left to the destination hosts.  Therefore, a gateway
      will not perform reassembly on datagrams it forwards.

      However, a gateway will generally receive some IP datagrams
      addressed to itself; for example, these may be ICMP Request/Reply
      messages, routing update messages (see Sections 2.3 and 2.6), or
      for monitoring and control (see Section 5).  For these datagrams,
      the gateway will be functioning as a destination host, so it must
      implement IP reassembly in case the datagrams have been fragmented
      by some transit gateway.  The destination gateway must have a
      reassembly buffer which is at least as large as the maximum of the
      MTU values for its network interfaces and 576.  Note also that it
      is possible for a particular protocol implemented by a host or
      gateway to require a lower bound on reassembly buffer size which
      is larger than 576.  Finally, a datagram which is addressed to a
      gateway may use any of that gateway's IP addresses as destination
      address, regardless of which interface the datagram enters.

      There are five classes of IP addresses:  Class A through
      Class E [23].  Of these, Class D and Class E addresses are
ToP   noToC   RFC1009 - Page 14
      reserved for experimental use.  A gateway which is not
      participating in these experiments must ignore all datagrams with
      a Class D or Class E destination IP address.  ICMP Destination
      Unreachable or ICMP Redirect messages must not result from
      receiving such datagrams.

      There are certain special cases for IP addresses, defined in the
      latest Assigned Numbers document [23].  These special cases can be
      concisely summarized using the earlier notation for an IP address:

         IP-address ::=  { <Network-number>, <Host-number> }

            or

         IP-address ::=  { <Network-number>, <Subnet-number>,
                                                         <Host-number> }

      if we also use the notation "-1" to mean the field contains all 1
      bits.  Some common special cases are as follows:

         (a)   {0, 0}

            This host on this network.  Can only be used as a source
            address (see note later).

         (b)   {0, <Host-number>}

            Specified host on this network.  Can only be used as a
            source address.

         (c)   { -1, -1}

            Limited broadcast.  Can only be used as a destination
            address, and a datagram with this address must never be
            forwarded outside the (sub-)net of the source.

         (d)   {<Network-number>, -1}

            Directed broadcast to specified network.  Can only be used
            as a destination address.

         (e)   {<Network-number>, <Subnet-number>, -1}

            Directed broadcast to specified subnet.  Can only be used as
            a destination address.

         (f)   {<Network-number>, -1, -1}
ToP   noToC   RFC1009 - Page 15
            Directed broadcast to all subnets of specified subnetted
            network.  Can only be used as a destination address.

         (g)   {127, <any>}

            Internal host loopback address.  Should never appear outside
            a host.

      The following two are conventional notation for network numbers,
      and do not really represent IP addresses.  They can never be used
      in an IP datagram header as an IP source or destination address.

         (h)   {<Network-number>, 0}

            Specified network (no host).

         (i)   {<Network-number>, <Subnet-number>, 0}

            Specified subnet (no host).

      Note also that the IP broadcast address, which has primary
      application to Ethernets and similar technologies that support an
      inherent broadcast function, has an all-ones value in the host
      field of the IP address.  Some early implementations chose the
      all-zeros value for this purpose, which is not in conformance with
      the specification [23, 49, 50].

   2.2.  Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP)

      ICMP is an auxiliary protocol used to convey advice and error
      messages and is described in RFC-792 [2].

      We will discuss issues arising from gateway handling of particular
      ICMP messages.  The ICMP messages are grouped into two classes:
      error messages and information messages.  ICMP error messages are
      never sent about ICMP error messages, nor about broadcast or
      multicast datagrams.

         The ICMP error messages are: Destination Unreachable, Redirect,
         Source Quench, Time Exceeded, and Parameter Problem.

         The ICMP information messages are: Echo, Information,
         Timestamp, and Address Mask.
ToP   noToC   RFC1009 - Page 16
      2.2.1.  Destination Unreachable

         The distinction between subnets of a subnetted network, which
         depends on the address mask described in RFC-950 [21], must not
         be visible outside that network.  This distinction is important
         in the case of the ICMP Destination Unreachable message.

         The ICMP Destination Unreachable message is sent by a gateway
         in response to a datagram which it cannot forward because the
         destination is unreachable or down.  The gateway chooses one of
         the following two types of Destination Unreachable messages to
         send:

            *  Net Unreachable

            *  Host Unreachable

         Net unreachable implies that an intermediate gateway was unable
         to forward a datagram, as its routing data-base gave no next
         hop for the datagram, or all paths were down.  Host Unreachable
         implies that the destination network was reachable, but that a
         gateway on that network was unable to reach the destination
         host.  This might occur if the particular destination network
         was able to determine that the desired host was unreachable or
         down.  It might also occur when the destination host was on a
         subnetted network and no path was available through the subnets
         of this network to the destination.  Gateways should send Host
         Unreachable messages whenever other hosts on the same
         destination network might be reachable; otherwise, the source
         host may erroneously conclude that ALL hosts on the network are
         unreachable, and that may not be the case.

      2.2.2.  Redirect

         The ICMP Redirect message is sent by a gateway to a host on the
         same network, in order to change the gateway used by the host
         for routing certain datagrams.  A choice of four types of
         Redirect messages is available to specify datagrams destined
         for a particular host or network, and possibly with a
         particular type-of-service.

         If the directly-connected network is not subnetted, a gateway
         can normally send a network Redirect which applies to all hosts
         on a specified remote network.  Using a network rather than a
         host Redirect may economize slightly on network traffic and on
         host routing table storage.  However, the saving is not
         significant, and subnets create an ambiguity about the subnet
ToP   noToC   RFC1009 - Page 17
         mask to be used to interpret a network Redirect.  In a general
         subnet environment, it is difficult to specify precisely the
         cases in which network Redirects can be used.

         Therefore, it is recommended that a gateway send only host (or
         host and type-of-service) Redirects.

      2.2.3.  Source Quench

         All gateways must contain code for sending ICMP Source Quench
         messages when they are forced to drop IP datagrams due to
         congestion.  Although the Source Quench mechanism is known to
         be an imperfect means for Internet congestion control, and
         research towards more effective means is in progress, Source
         Quench is considered to be too valuable to omit from production
         gateways.

         There is some argument that the Source Quench should be sent
         before the gateway is forced to drop datagrams [62].  For
         example, a parameter X could be established and set to have
         Source Quench sent when only X buffers remain.  Or, a parameter
         Y could be established and set to have Source Quench sent when
         only Y per cent of the buffers remain.

         Two problems for a gateway sending Source Quench are: (1) the
         consumption of bandwidth on the reverse path, and (2) the use
         of gateway CPU time.  To ameliorate these problems, a gateway
         must be prepared to limit the frequency with which it sends
         Source Quench messages.  This may be on the basis of a count
         (e.g., only send a Source Quench for every N dropped datagrams
         overall or per given source host), or on the basis of a time
         (e.g., send a Source Quench to a given source host or overall
         at most once per T millseconds).  The parameters (e.g., N or T)
         must be settable as part of the configuration of the gateway;
         furthermore, there should be some configuration setting which
         disables sending Source Quenches.  These configuration
         parameters, including disabling, should ideally be specifiable
         separately for each network interface.

         Note that a gateway itself may receive a Source Quench as the
         result of sending a datagram targeted to another gateway.  Such
         datagrams might be an EGP update, for example.

      2.2.4.  Time Exceeded

         The ICMP Time Exceeded message may be sent when a gateway
         discards a datagram due to the TTL being reduced to zero.  It
ToP   noToC   RFC1009 - Page 18
         may also be sent by a gateway if the fragments of a datagram
         addressed to the gateway itself cannot be reassembled before
         the time limit.

      2.2.5.  Parameter Problem

         The ICMP Parameter Problem message may be sent to the source
         host for any problem not specifically covered by another ICMP
         message.

      2.2.6.  Address Mask

         Host and gateway implementations are expected to support the
         ICMP Address Mask messages described in RFC-950 [21].

      2.2.7.  Timestamp

         The ICMP Timestamp message has proven to be useful for
         diagnosing Internet problems.  The preferred form for a
         timestamp value, the "standard value", is in milliseconds since
         midnight GMT.  However, it may be difficult to provide this
         value with millisecond resolution.  For example, many systems
         use clocks which update only at line frequency, 50 or 60 times
         per second.  Therefore, some latitude is allowed in a
         "standard" value:

            *  The value must be updated at a frequency of at least 30
               times per second (i.e., at most five low-order bits of
               the value may be undefined).

            *  The origin of the value must be within a few minutes of
               midnight, i.e., the accuracy with which operators
               customarily set CPU clocks.

         To meet the second condition for a stand-alone gateway, it will
         be necessary to query some time server host when the gateway is
         booted or restarted.  It is recommended that the UDP Time
         Server Protocol [44] be used for this purpose.  A more advanced
         implementation would use NTP (Network Time Protocol) [45] to
         achieve nearly millisecond clock synchronization; however, this
         is not required.

         Even if a gateway is unable to establish its time origin, it
         ought to provide a "non-standard" timestamp value (i.e., with
         the non-standard bit set), as a time in milliseconds from
         system startup.
ToP   noToC   RFC1009 - Page 19
         New gateways, especially those expecting to operate at T1 or
         higher speeds, are expected to have at least millisecond
         clocks.

      2.2.8.  Information Request/Reply

         The Information Request/Reply pair was intended to support
         self-configuring systems such as diskless workstations, to
         allow them to discover their IP network numbers at boot time.
         However, the Reverse ARP (RARP) protocol [15] provides a better
         mechanism for a host to use to discover its own IP address, and
         RARP is recommended for this purpose.  Information
         Request/Reply need not be implemented in a gateway.

      2.2.9.  Echo Request/Reply

         A gateway must implement ICMP Echo, since it has proven to be
         an extremely useful diagnostic tool.  A gateway must be
         prepared to receive, reassemble, and echo an ICMP Echo Request
         datagram at least as large as the maximum of 576 and the MTU's
         of all of the connected networks.  See the discussion of IP
         reassembly in gateways, Section 2.1.

         The following rules resolve the question of the use of IP
         source routes in Echo Request and Reply datagrams.  Suppose a
         gateway D receives an ICMP Echo Request addressed to itself
         from host S.

            1.  If the Echo Request contained no source route, D should
                send an Echo Reply back to S using its normal routing
                rules.  As a result, the Echo Reply may take a different
                path than the Request; however, in any case, the pair
                will sample the complete round-trip path which any other
                higher-level protocol (e.g., TCP) would use for its data
                and ACK segments between S and D.

            2.  If the Echo Request did contain a source route, D should
                send an Echo Reply back to S using as a source route the
                return route built up in the source-routing option of
                the Echo Request.
ToP   noToC   RFC1009 - Page 20
   2.3.  Exterior Gateway Protocol (EGP)

      EGP is the protocol used to exchange reachability information
      between Autonomous Systems of gateways, and is defined in
      RFC-904 [11].  See also RFC-827 [51], RFC-888 [46], and
      RFC-975 [27] for background information.  The most widely used EGP
      implementation is described in RFC-911 [13].

      When a dynamic routing algorithm is operated in the gateways of an
      Autonomous System (AS), the routing data-base must be coupled to
      the EGP implementation.  This coupling should ensure that, when a
      net is determined to be unreachable by the routing algorithm, the
      net will not be declared reachable to other ASs via EGP.  This
      requirement is designed to minimize spurious traffic to "black
      holes" and to ensure fair utilization of the resources on other
      systems.

      The present EGP specification defines a model with serious
      limitations, most importantly a restriction against propagating
      "third party" EGP information in order to prevent long-lived
      routing loops [27].  This effectively limits EGP to a two-level
      hierarchy; the top level is formed by the "core" AS, while the
      lower level is composed of those ASs which are direct neighbor
      gateways to the core AS.  In practice, in the current Internet,
      nearly all of the "core gateways" are connected to the ARPANET,
      while the lower level is composed of those ASs which are directly
      gatewayed to the ARPANET or MILNET.

      RFC-975 [27] suggested one way to generalize EGP to lessen these
      topology restrictions;  it has not been adopted as an official
      specification, although its ideas are finding their way into the
      new EGP developments.  There are efforts underway in the research
      community to develop an EGP generalization which will remove these
      restrictions.

      In EGP, there is no standard interpretation (i.e., metric) for the
      distance fields in the update messages, so distances are
      comparable only among gateways of the same AS.  In using EGP data,
      a gateway should compare the distances among gateways of the same
      AS and prefer a route to that gateway which has the smallest
      distance value.

      The values to be announced in the distance fields for particular
      networks within the local AS should be a gateway configuration
      parameter; by suitable choice of these values, it will be possible
      to arrange primary and backup paths from other AS's.  There are
      other EGP parameters, such as polling intervals, which also need
      to be set in the gateway configuration.
ToP   noToC   RFC1009 - Page 21
      When routing updates become large they must be transmitted in
      parts.  One strategy is to use IP fragmentation, another is to
      explicitly send the routing information in sections.  The Internet
      Engineering Task Force is currently preparing a recommendation on
      this and other EGP engineering issues.

   2.4.  Address Resolution Protocol (ARP)

      ARP is an auxiliary protocol used to perform dynamic address
      translation between LAN hardware addresses and Internet addresses,
      and is described in RFC-826 [4].

      ARP depends upon local network broadcast.  In normal ARP usage,
      the initiating host broadcasts an ARP Request carrying a target IP
      address; the corresponding target host, recognizing its own IP
      address, sends back an ARP Reply containing its own hardware
      interface address.

      A variation on this procedure, called "proxy ARP", has been used
      by gateways attached to broadcast LANs [14].  The gateway sends an
      ARP Reply specifying its interface address in response to an ARP
      Request for a target IP address which is not on the
      directly-connected network but for which the gateway offers an
      appropriate route.  By observing ARP and proxy ARP traffic, a
      gateway may accumulate a routing data-base [14].

      Proxy ARP (also known in some quarters as "promiscuous ARP" or
      "the ARP hack") is useful for routing datagrams from hosts which
      do not implement the standard Internet routing rules fully -- for
      example, host implementations which predate the introduction of
      subnetting.  Proxy ARP for subnetting is discussed in detail in
      RFC-925 [14].

      Reverse ARP (RARP) allows a host to map an Ethernet interface
      address into an IP address [15].  RARP is intended to allow a
      self-configuring host to learn its own IP address from a server at
      boot time.

   2.5.  Constituent Network Access Protocols

      See Section 3.
ToP   noToC   RFC1009 - Page 22
   2.6.  Interior Gateway Protocols

      Distributed routing algorithms continue to be the subject of
      research and engineering, and it is likely that advances will be
      made over the next several years.  A good algorithm needs to
      respond rapidly to real changes in Internet connectivity, yet be
      stable and insensitive to transients.  It needs to synchronize the
      distributed data-base across gateways of its Autonomous System
      rapidly (to avoid routing loops), while consuming only a small
      fraction of the available bandwidth.

      Distributed routing algorithms are commonly broken down into the
      following three components:

         A.  An algorithm to assign a "length" to each Internet path.

            The "length" may be a simple count of hops (1, or infinity
            if the path is broken), or an administratively-assigned
            cost, or some dynamically-measured cost (usually an average
            delay).

            In order to determine a path length, each gateway must at
            least test whether each of its neighbors is reachable; for
            this purpose, there must be a "reachability" or "neighbor
            up/down" protocol.

         B.  An algorithm to compute the shortest path(s) to a given
             destination.

         C.  A gateway-gateway protocol used to exchange path length and
             routing information among gateways.

      The most commonly-used IGPs in Internet gateways are as follows.

      2.6.1.  Gateway-to-Gateway Protocol (GGP)

         GGP was designed and implemented by BBN for the first
         experimental Internet gateways [41].  It is still in use in the
         BBN LSI/11 gateways, but is regarded as having serious
         drawbacks [58].  GGP is based upon an algorithm used in the
         early ARPANET IMPs and later replaced by SPF (see below).

         GGP is a "min-hop" algorithm, i.e., its length measure is
         simply the number of network hops between gateway pairs.  It
         implements a distributed shortest-path algorithm, which
         requires global convergence of the routing tables after a
         change in topology or connectivity.  Each gateway sends a GGP
ToP   noToC   RFC1009 - Page 23
         routing update only to its neighbors, but each update includes
         an entry for every known network, where each entry contains the
         hop count from the gateway sending the update.

      2.6.2.  Shortest-Path-First (SPF) Protocols

         SPF [40] is the name for a class of routing algorithms based on
         a shortest-path algorithm of Dijkstra.  The current ARPANET
         routing algorithm is SPF, and the BBN Butterfly gateways also
         use SPF.  Its characteristics are considered superior to
         GGP [58].

         Under SPF, the routing data-base is replicated rather than
         distributed.  Each gateway will have its own copy of the same
         data-base, containing the entire Internet topology and the
         lengths of every path.  Since each gateway has all the routing
         data and runs a shortest-path algorithm locally, there is no
         problem of global convergence of a distributed algorithm, as in
         GGP.  To build this replicated data-base, a gateway sends SPF
         routing updates to ALL other gateways; these updates only list
         the distances to each of the gateway's neighbors, making them
         much smaller than GGP updates.  The algorithm used to
         distribute SPF routing updates involves reliable flooding.

      2.6.3.  Routing Information (RIP)

         RIP is the name often used for a class of routing protocols
         based upon the Xerox PUP and XNS routing protocols.  These are
         relatively simple, and are widely available because they are
         incorporated in the embedded gateway code of Berkeley BSD
         systems.  Because of this simplicity, RIP protocols have come
         the closest of any to being an "Open IGP", i.e., a protocol
         which can be used between different vendors' gateways.
         Unfortunately, there is no standard, and in fact not even a
         good document, for RIP.

         As in GGP, gateways using RIP periodically broadcast their
         routing data-base to their neighbor gateways, and use a
         hop-count as the metric.

         A fixed value of the hop-count (normally 16) is defined to be
         "infinity", i.e., network unreachable.  A RIP implementation
         must include measures to avoid both the slow-convergence
         phenomen called "counting to infinity" and the formation of
         routing loops.  One such measure is a "hold-down" rule.  This
         rule establishes a period of time (typically 60 seconds) during
         which a gateway will ignore new routing information about a
         given network, once the gateway has learned that network is
ToP   noToC   RFC1009 - Page 24
         unreachable (has hop-count "infinity").  The hold-down period
         must be settable in the gateway configuration; if gateways with
         different hold-down periods are using RIP in the same
         Autonomous System, routing loops are a distinct possibility.
         In general, the hold-down period is chosen large enough to
         allow time for unreachable status to propagate to all gateways
         in the AS.

      2.6.4.  Hello

         The "Fuzzball" software for an LSI/11 developed by Dave Mills
         incorporated an IGP called the "Hello" protocol [39].  This IGP
         is mentioned here because the Fuzzballs have been widely used
         in Internet experimentation, and because they have served as a
         testbed for many new routing ideas.

   2.7.  Monitoring Protocols

      See Section 5 of this document.

   2.8.  Internet Group Management Protocol (IGMP)

      An extension to the IP protocol has been defined to provide
      Internet-wide multicasting, i.e., delivery of copies of the same
      IP datagram to a set of Internet hosts [47, 48].  This delivery is
      to be performed by processes known as "multicasting agents", which
      reside either in a host on each net or (preferably) in the
      gateways.

      The set of hosts to which a datagram is delivered is called a
      "host group", and there is a host-agent protocol called IGMP,
      which a host uses to join, leave, or create a group.  Each host
      group is distinguished by a Class D IP address.

      This multicasting mechanism and its IGMP protocol are currently
      experimental; implementation in vendor gateways would be premature
      at this time.  A datagram containing a Class D IP address must be
      dropped, with no ICMP error message.


(next page on part 2)

Next Section