APT: A Practical Transit Mapping Service

The size of the global routing table is a rapidly growing problem. Several solutions have been proposed. These solutions commonly divide the Internet into two parts, one for customers and one for providers, where only provider addresses are globally routable. Packets destined for customer addresses are tunneled through provider space. For this process to work, there must be a mapping service that can supply an appropriate provider-edge address for any given customer address. We present a design for such a mapping service. We adhere to a "do no harm" design philosophy: maintain all desirable features of the current architecture without negatively affecting its security or reliability. Our design aims to minimize delay and prevent loss in packet encapsulation, minimize the number of new or modified devices, and keep the level of control traffic manageable.