Topology Aggregating Routing Architecture (TARA)

TARA (Topology Aggregating Routing Architecture) is a novel architecture which allows to generate a map of the Internet. TARA allows to maintain and compute a precise topology of the near surrounding and lesser zoomed topologies the more remote they are. In the context of TARA, nodes are identified with "locators" which are derived from longitude/latitude degrees/minutes/seconds. TARA is designed to satisfy advanced traffic engineering such as computing QoS-inferred paths or non congested paths. TARA achieves these goals without requiring an increase of RIBs and FIBs. TARA solves also the issues of dynamic update churn as currently experienced in BGP-based Internet. TARA is also designed with mobility requirements in mind. Indeed, Mobility is supported without requiring dependency on home agents or care-of-address servers. Note, the Time-To-Live mechanism is neither needed nor used in TARA-forwarding. TARA supports various multicast, broadcast, MP2P (multipoint-to-point), anycast and MP2MP (multipoint-to-multipoint) communication schemes. In particular a stateless concept for multicast is outlined; this concept may serve as a pattern for anycast and MP2MP applications. TARA is fully prepared to cope with the IPv4-unicast address depletion issue.