Routing In Fat Trees Protocol

Data Centers have been steadily growing to commonly host tens of thousands of end points, or more, in a single network. Because of their topologies (traditional and emerging), traffic patterns, need for fast restoration, and for low human intervention, data center networks have a unique set of requirements that is resulting in the design of routing solutions specific to them. Clos and Fat-Tree topologies have gained popularity in data center networks as a result of a trend towards centralized data center network architectures that may deliver computation and storage services.

The Routing in Fat Trees (RIFT) protocol addresses the demands of routing in Clos and Fat-Tree networks via a mixture of both link-state and distance-vector techniques colloquially described as 'link-state towards the spine and distance vector towards the leafs'. RIFT uses this hybrid approach to focus on networks with regular topologies with a high degree of connectivity, a defined directionality, and large scale.

The RIFT Working Group will work on a standards track specification of a specialized, dynamic routing protocol for Clos and fat-tree network topologies. The protocol will:
- deal with automatic construction of fat-tree topologies based on detection of links
- minimize the amount of routing state held at each topology level
- automatically prune topology distribution exchanges to a sufficient subset of links
- support automatic disaggregation of prefixes on link and node failures to prevent black-holing and suboptimal routing
- allow traffic steering and re-routing policies
- and provide mechanisms to synchronize a limited key-value data-store that can be used after protocol convergence

It is important that nodes participating in the protocol should need only very light configuration and should be able to join a network as leaf nodes simply by connecting to the network using default configuration.

The protocol must support IPv6 and should also support IPv4.

Working Group Details can be found here.

People who read this post also read :