RFC 1347 (rfc1347) - Page 2 of 9
TCP and UDP with Bigger Addresses (TUBA), A Simple Proposal for Internet Addressing and Routing
Alternative Format: Original Text Document
RFC 1347 TUBA: A Proposal for Addressing and Routing June 1992
CLNP packets and vice versa, or encapsulation of IP packets
inside CLNP packets. However, other shorter-term techniques (for
example [3]) have been proposed which will allow the Internet to
operate successfully for several years using the current IP
address space. This in turn allows more time for IP-to-CLNP
migration, which in turn allows for a much simpler migration
technique.
The TUBA proposal therefore makes use of a simple long-term
migration proposal based on a gradual update of Internet Hosts
(to run Internet applications over CLNP) and DNS servers (to
return larger addresses). This proposal requires routers to be
updated to support forwarding of CLNP (in addition to IP).
However, this proposal does not require encapsulation nor
translation of packets nor address mapping. IP addresses and NSAP
addresses may be assigned and used independently during the
migration period. Routing and forwarding of IP and CLNP packets
may be done independently.
This paper provides a draft overview of TUBA. The detailed
operation of TUBA has been left for further study.
2 Long-Term Goal of TUBA
This proposal seeks to take advantage of the success of the
Internet Suite, the greatest part of which is probably the use of
IP itself. IP offers a ubiquitous network service, based on
datagram (connectionless) operation, and on globally significant
IP addresses which are structured to aid routing. Unfortunately,
the limited 32-bit IP address is gradually becoming inadequate
for routing and addressing in a global Internet. Scaling to the
anticipated future size of the worldwide Internet requires much
larger addresses allowing a multi-level hierarchical address
assignment.
If we had the luxury of starting over from scratch, most likely
we would base the Internet on a new datagram internet protocol
with much larger multi-level addresses. In principle, there are
many choices available for a new datagram internet protocol. For
example, the current IP could be augmented by addition of larger
addresses, or a new protocol could be developed. However, the
development, standardization, implementation, testing, debugging
and deployment of a new protocol (as well as associated routing
and host-to-router protocols) would take a very large amount of
time and energy, and is not guaranteed to lead to success. In
addition, there is already such a protocol available. In
particular, the ConnectionLess Network Protocol (CLNP [1]) is
very similar to IP, and offers the required datagram service and
address flexibility. CLNP is currently being deployed in the
Internet backbones and regionals, and is available in vendor
products. This proposal does not actually require use of CLNP
(the main content of this proposal is a graceful migration path
from the current IP to a new IP offering a larger address space),
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