Section: New Results

On the Performance of the LISP Beta Network

Contributor: Damien Saucez

The future Internet has been a hot topic during the past decade and many approaches towards this future Internet, ranging from incremental evolution to complete clean slate ones, have been proposed. One of the proposition, LISP, advocates for the separation of the identifier and the locator roles of IP addresses to reduce BGP churn and BGP table size. Up to now, however, most studies concerning LISP have been theoretical and, in fact, little is known about the actual LISP deployment performance. In [16] , we report the measurement campaigns carried out on the LISP Beta Network. More precisely, we evaluated the performance of the two key components of the infrastructure: the control plane (i.e., the mapping system) and the interworking mechanism (i.e., communication between LISP and non-LISP sites). Our measurements highlight that performance offered by the LISP interworking infrastructure is strongly dependent on BGP routing policies. If we exclude misconfigured nodes, the mapping system typically provides reliable performance and relatively low median mapping resolution delays. Although the bias is not very important, control plane performance favors USA sites as a result of its larger LISP user base but also because European infrastructure appears to be less reliable.

This work resulted in a collaboration with Telecom ParisTech starting in mid-2014 a PhD thesis on the feasibility of large scale measurement of LISP networks with Luigi Iannone as advisor and Damien Saucez as co-advisor.