LISP controller: a centralized LISP management system for ISP networks

Abstract

As the current Internet architecture is suffering from scalability issues, the network research community has proposed alternative designs for the Internet architecture. Among those solutions that adopt the idea of locator/identifier split paradigm, the locator/identifier separation protocol (LISP) has been considered as the most promising solution because of its incrementally deployable feature. Despite various advantages provided by LISP, many ISPs are still conservative to adopt LISP into their production network because the standard LISP does not fully satisfy ISP's requirements on LISP-enabled services. In this paper, we define ISP's requirements on LISP-enabled commercial services and describe limitations of the standard LISP from an ISP's perspective. Also, we propose LISP controller, a centralized LISP management system. By using LISP controller, we evaluate three ISP's representative LISP use cases: traffic engineering, virtual machine live migration, and vertical handover. The results show that the proposed LISP controller provides centralized management, controllability, and fast map entry update, without any modifications on the standard LISP. LISP controller allows an ISP to control and manage its LISP-enabled services while satisfying ISP's requirements. Copyright (c) 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.