Routing Basics

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 Routing Concepts
• IPv4
• Routing
• Forwarding
• Some definitions
• Policy options
• Routing Protocols

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 IPv4
• Internet uses IPv4
– Addresses are 32 bits long
– Range from 1.0.0.0 to 223.255.255.255
– 0.0.0.0 to 0.255.255.255 and 224.0.0.0 to
255.255.255.255 have “special” uses
• IPv4 address has a network portion and a host
portion

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 IPv4 address format
• Address and subnet mask
– written as
– 12.34.56.78 255.255.255.0 or
– 12.34.56.78/24
– mask represents the number of network bits in
the 32 bit address
– the remaining bits are the host bits

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What does a router do?

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 A day in a life of a router

find path
forward packet, forward packet, forward packet,
forward packet...
find alternate path
forward packet, forward packet, forward packet,
forward packet…
repeat until powered off

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 Routing versus Forwarding
• Routing = building
maps and giving
directions
• Forwarding = moving
packets between
interfaces according
to the
directions

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 IP Routing – finding the path
• Path derived from information received from a
routing protocol
• Several alternative paths may exist
– best path stored in forwarding table
• Decisions are updated periodically or as
topology changes (event driven)
• Decisions are based on:
– topology, policies and metrics (hop count,
filtering, delay, bandwidth, etc.)

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 IP route lookup
• Based on destination IP address
• longest match routing
– More specific prefix preferred over less specific
prefix
– Example: packet with destination of 10.1.1.1/32 is
sent to the router announcing 10.1/16 rather than
the router announcing 10/8.

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 IP route lookup
• Based on destination IP address
10/8 announced
Packet: Destination R3 from here
IP address: 10.1.1.1

R1 R2

R4
10/8  R3
10.1/16 announced
10.1/16  R4
from here
20/8  R5
30/8  R6
…..
R2 s IP routing table
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 IP route lookup:
Longest match routing
• Based on destination IP address
10/8 announced
Packet: Destination R3 from here
IP address: 10.1.1.1

R1 R2

R4
10/8  R3 10.1.1.1 && FF.0.0.0 10.1/16 announced
10.1/16  vs. Match! from here
R4 10.0.0.0 && FF.0.0.0
20/8  R5
30/8  R6
R2…..s IP routing table
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 IP route lookup:
Longest match routing
• Based on destination IP address
10/8 announced
Packet: Destination R3 from here
IP address: 10.1.1.1

R1 R2

R4
10/8  R3 10.1/16 announced
10.1.1.1 && FF.FF.0.0
10.1/16  R4 Match as well! from here
vs.
20/8  R5
10.1.0.0 && FF.FF.0.0
30/8  R6
…..
R2 s IP routing table
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 IP route lookup:
Longest match routing
• Based on destination IP address
10/8 announced
Packet: Destination R3 from here
IP address: 10.1.1.1

R1 R2

R4
10/8  R3 10.1/16 announced
10.1/16  R4 from here
20/8  R5 10.1.1.1 && FF.0.0.0
vs. Does not match!
30/8  R6
….. 20.0.0.0 && FF.0.0.0
R2 s IP routing table
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 IP route lookup:
Longest match routing
• Based on destination IP address
10/8 announced
Packet: Destination R3 from here
IP address: 10.1.1.1

R1 R2

R4
10/8  R3 10.1/16 announced
10.1/16  R4 from here
20/8  R5 10.1.1.1 && FF.0.0.0
30/8  R6 vs. Does not match!
….. 30.0.0.0 && FF.0.0.0
R2 s IP routing table
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 IP route lookup:
Longest match routing
• Based on destination IP address
10/8 announced
Packet: Destination R3 from here
IP address: 10.1.1.1

R1 R2

R4
10/8  R3 10.1/16 announced
10.1/16  R4 Longest match, 16 bit netmask from here
20/8  R5
30/8  R6
…..
R2 s IP routing table
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 IP Forwarding
• Router decides which interface a packet is
sent to
• Forwarding table populated by routing
process
• Forwarding decisions:
– destination address
– class of service (fair queuing, precedence, others)
– local requirements (packet filtering)
• Forwarding is usually aided by special
hardware

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 Routing Tables Feed the Forwarding Table

Routing Information Base (RIB)

Forwarding Information Base (FIB)

BGP 4 Routing Table

OSPF – Link State Database

Connected Routes

Static Routes

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 RIBs and FIBs
• FIB is the Forwarding Table
– It contains destinations and the interfaces to get to those destinations
– Used by the router to figure out where to send the packet
– Careful! Some people still call this a route!
• RIB is the Routing Table
– It contains a list of all the destinations and the various next hops used
to get to those destinations – and lots of other information too!
– One destination can have lots of possible next-hops – only the best
next-hop goes into the FIB

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 Explicit versus Default Routing
• Default:
– simple, cheap (cycles, memory, bandwidth)
– low granularity (metric games)
• Explicit (default free zone)
– high overhead, complex, high cost, high
granularity
• Hybrid
– minimise overhead
– provide useful granularity
– requires some filtering knowledge
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 Egress Traffic
• How packets leave your network
• Egress traffic depends on:
– route availability (what others send you)
– route acceptance (what you accept from others)
– policy and tuning (what you do with routes from
others)
– Peering and transit agreements

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 Ingress Traffic
• How packets get to your network and your
customers networks
• Ingress traffic depends on:
– what information you send and to whom
– based on your addressing and AS s
– based on others policy (what they accept from
you and what they do with it)

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 Autonomous System (AS)

AS 100

• Collection of networks with same routing policy

• Single routing protocol
• Usually under single ownership, trust and administrative
control

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 Definition of terms
• Neighbours
– AS’s which directly exchange routing information
– Routers which exchange routing information
• Announce
– send routing information to a neighbour
• Accept
– receive and use routing information sent by a neighbour
• Originate
– insert routing information into external announcements (usually as a
result of the IGP)
• Peers
– routers in neighbouring AS s or within one AS which exchange
routing and policy information

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Routing flow and packet flow

packet flow
accept announce
AS 1 announce
routing flow
accept AS 2
packet flow

For networks in AS1 and AS2 to communicate:

AS1 must announce to AS2
AS2 must accept from AS1
AS2 must announce to AS1
AS1 must accept from AS2

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 Routing flow and Traffic flow
• Traffic flow is always in the opposite direction
of the flow of Routing information
– Filtering outgoing routing information inhibits
traffic flow inbound
– Filtering inbound routing information inhibits
traffic flow outbound

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 Routing Flow/Packet Flow:
With multiple ASes

AS 1
AS 34
N1
AS16
AS 8
N16

• For net N1 in AS1 to send traffic to net N16 in AS16:

– AS16 must originate and announce N16 to AS8.
– AS8 must accept N16 from AS16.
– AS8 must announce N16 to AS1 or AS34.
– AS1 must accept N16 from AS8 or AS34.
• For two-way packet flow, similar policies must exist for N1
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 Routing Flow/Packet Flow:
With multiple ASes

AS 1
AS 34
N1
AS16
AS 8
N16

• As multiple paths between sites are

implemented it is easy to see how policies
can become quite complex.
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 Routing Policy
• Used to control traffic flow in and out of an ISP
network
• ISP makes decisions on what routing information
to accept and discard from its neighbours
– Individual routes
– Routes originated by specific ASes
– Routes traversing specific ASes
– Routes belonging to other groupings
• Groupings which you define as you see fit

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 Routing Policy Limitations

red
red
Internet AS99

green green

packet flow
• AS99 uses red link for traffic to the red AS and the green link
for remaining traffic
• To implement this policy, AS99 has to:
– Accept routes originating from the red AS on the red link
– Accept all other routes on the green link

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 Routing Policy Limitations

red
red Internet
AS22 AS99

green green

packet flow
• AS99 would like packets coming from the green AS to use the green
link.
• But unless AS22 cooperates in pushing traffic from the green AS
down the green link, there is very little that AS99 can do to achieve
this aim

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 Routing Policy Issues

• Late May 2012:

– 410000 prefixes
• Not realistic to set policy on all of them individually
– 42000 origin AS s
• Too many to try and create individual policies for
• Routes tied to a specific AS or path may be
unstable regardless of connectivity
• Solution: Groups of AS s are a natural
abstraction for filtering purposes
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 Routing Protocols

We now know what routing means…

…but what do the routers get up to?
And why are we doing this anyway?

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 1: How Does Routing Work?
• Internet is made up of the ISPs who connect to
each other s networks
• How does an ISP in Kenya tell an ISP in Japan
what customers they have?
• And how does that ISP send data packets to the
customers of the ISP in Japan, and get responses
back
– After all, as on a local ethernet, two way packet flow is
needed for communication between two devices

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 2: How Does Routing Work?
• ISP in Kenya could buy a direct connection to
the ISP in Japan
– But this doesn t scale – thousands of ISPs, would
need thousands of connections, and cost would
be astronomical
• Instead, ISP in Kenya tells his neighbouring
ISPs what customers he has
– And the neighbouring ISPs pass this information
on to their neighbours, and so on
– This process repeats until the information reaches
the ISP in Japan
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 3: How Does Routing Work?
• This process is called Routing
• The mechanisms used are called Routing
Protocols
• Routing and Routing Protocols ensures that
the Internet can scale, that thousands of ISPs
can provide connectivity to each other, giving
us the Internet we see today

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 4: How Does Routing Work?
• ISP in Kenya doesn t actually tell his neighbouring ISPs the
names of the customers
– (network equipment does not understand names)
• Instead, he has received an IP address block as a member of
the Regional Internet Registry serving Kenya
– His customers have received address space from this address block as
part of their Internet service
– And he announces this address block to his neighbouring ISPs – this is
called announcing a route

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 Routing Protocols
• Routers use routing protocols to
exchange routing information with each other
– IGP is used to refer to the process running on
routers inside an ISP s network
– EGP is used to refer to the process running
between routers bordering directly connected ISP
networks

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 What Is an IGP?
• Interior Gateway Protocol
• Within an Autonomous System
• Carries information about internal
infrastructure prefixes
• Two widely used IGPs:
– OSPF
– ISIS

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 Why Do We Need an IGP?
• ISP backbone scaling
– Hierarchy
– Limiting scope of failure
– Only used for ISP’s infrastructure addresses, not
customers or anything else
– Design goal is to minimise number of prefixes in
IGP to aid scalability and rapid convergence

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 What Is an EGP?
• Exterior Gateway Protocol
• Used to convey routing information between
Autonomous Systems
• De-coupled from the IGP
• Current EGP is BGP

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 Why Do We Need an EGP?
• Scaling to large network
– Hierarchy
– Limit scope of failure
• Define Administrative Boundary
• Policy
– Control reachability of prefixes
– Merge separate organisations
– Connect multiple IGPs

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 Interior versus Exterior
Routing Protocols
• Interior • Exterior
– automatic neighbour – specifically configured
discovery peers
– generally trust your IGP – connecting with outside
routers networks
– prefixes go to all IGP – set administrative
routers boundaries
– binds routers in one AS – binds AS’s together
together

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 Interior versus Exterior
Routing Protocols
• Interior • Exterior
– Carries ISP infrastructure – Carries customer
addresses only prefixes
– ISPs aim to keep the IGP – Carries Internet prefixes
small for efficiency and – EGPs are independent of
scalability ISP network topology

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Hierarchy of Routing Protocols
Other ISPs
BGP4

BGP4
and OSPF/ISIS

BGP4 Static/BGP4

IXP Customers

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FYI: Cisco IOS Default Administrative
Distances
Route Source Default Distance

Connected Interface 0
Static Route 1
Enhanced IGRP Summary Route 5
External BGP 20
Internal Enhanced IGRP 90
IGRP 100
OSPF 110
IS-IS 115
RIP 120
EGP 140
External Enhanced IGRP 170
Internal BGP 200
Unknown 255 45
Routing Basics

End

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