Routing
The Routing Area is responsible for facilitating the operation of the Internet routing system by maintaining and improving the scalability and stability characteristics of the existing routing protocols and developing new protocols, extensions, and bug fixes. Forwarding methods (such as destination-based unicast and multicast forwarding, MPLS, and pseudowire) as well as associated routing and signaling protocols (such as OSPF, IS-IS, BGP, RSVP-TE, LDP, PIM, RPL, and VPNs at Layer 2, Layer 3), and both centralized and distributed routing architectures (to address, for example, virtualization, service chaining, traffic engineering, and data center routing) are within the scope of the Routing Area. The interactions of routing systems with configuration and orchestration platforms (for example, routing-related YANG models and path computation engines) are handled in the Routing Area. The Routing Area also works on Generalized MPLS used in the control plane of optical networks and the security and manageability aspects of the routing system. The Routing Area Working Groups cover a wide range of data plane technologies (Layer 1, Layer 2, Layer 3) and control protocols.
A Routing AD must have a solid knowledge of the Internet routing system and its operations. A Routing AD must be proficient in at least one of the mainstream routing protocols or technologies such as BGP, OSPF, IS-IS, MPLS, GMPLS, Segment Routing, or multicast. A Routing AD should know about routing services (pseudowire, L2VPN, L3VPN). Familiarity with recent trends in routing (new routing management models, wireless, or deterministic networking) would be helpful. Implementation, deployment, operational experience, and significant contributions to the WGs in the Routing Area are highly desirable. This experience is also desired in non-traditional environments such as mobile, ad hoc, and sensor networks (and other IoT-related deployments), including understanding interactions with other network systems, including security and management.
The Routing Area is managed by three Area Directors who typically divide WG responsibility based on workload and expertise. In addition, an active Routing Area directorate assists the ADs by providing technical reviews on demand. Given the broad range of related technical topics, the Routing ADs closely coordinate the overall direction of the area and routinely engage the WG Chairs. Besides IESG-level commitments, the Routing ADs meet periodically and organize training and other informal meetings with the WG Chairs.
The Routing Area intersects most frequently with the Internet Area, the Operations and Management Area, and the Security Area. Interaction with the Internet Area concentrates mainly on IP forwarding and encapsulation. Ongoing work with the Operations and Management Area is on developing YANG models and considering the management and operation of the routing infrastructure. With the Security Area, the ongoing focus is on routing protocol security and its impact on the Internet's infrastructure security. Cross-area expertise in any of those areas would be helpful.
Work in the Routing Area often overlaps with work in other SDOs. In particular, there have been interactions with the BBF, IEEE, and ITU-T. Therefore, knowledge of the workings of other SDOs would be beneficial.
The content of this page was last updated on 2022-07-07. It was migrated from the old Trac wiki on 2023-02-17.