Advantages of a PCE-based Control Plane for LISP ∗

The Locator/Identifier Separation Protocol (LISP) is one of the candidate solutions to address the scalability issues in inter-domain routing. The current proposals for its control plane (e.g., ALT, CONS, NERD) have various shortcomings, including the potential dropping of packets at LISP routers during the resolution of the EID-to-RLOC mapping. In this paper, we introduce a new Control Plane (CP) for LISP sup-ported by an architecture that borrows concepts from both the Path Computation Element (PCE) and Intelligent Route Control (IRC). Our CP is able to tackle three different prob-lems simultaneously: (i) packets sourced from end-hosts are neither dropped nor queued during the mapping resolution; (ii) the EID-to-RLOC mapping can be obtained and config-ured approximately within the DNS resolution time needed to fetch the destination EID address; and (iii) our approach can blend IRC with the PCE capabilities, to perform up-stream/downstream Traffic Engineering (TE) through the dy-namic management of the mappings. In particular, our CP supports the utilization of different LISP ingress and egress local routers for the same flow sourced from a domain. 1