7. Router Performance Considerations

7. Router Performance Considerations

LISP is designed to be very "hardware-based forwarding friendly". A few implementation techniques can be used to incrementally implement LISP:

o When a tunnel-encapsulated packet is received by an ETR, the outer destination address may not be the address of the router. This makes it challenging for the control plane to get packets from the hardware. This may be mitigated by creating special Forwarding Information Base (FIB) entries for the EID-Prefixes of EIDs served by the ETR (those for which the router provides an RLOC translation). These FIB entries are marked with a flag indicating that control-plane processing should be performed. The forwarding logic of testing for particular IP protocol number values is not necessary. There are a few proven cases where no changes to existing deployed hardware were needed to support the LISP data- plane.

o On an ITR, prepending a new IP header consists of adding more octets to a MAC rewrite string and prepending the string as part of the outgoing encapsulation procedure. Routers that support Generic Routing Encapsulation (GRE) tunneling [RFC2784] or 6to4 tunneling [RFC3056] may already support this action.

o A packet's source address or interface the packet was received on can be used to select VRF (Virtual Routing/Forwarding). The VRF's routing table can be used to find EID-to-RLOC mappings.

For performance issues related to map-cache management, see Section 12.