Interworking between Locator/ID Separation Protocol (LISP) and Non-LISP Sites

Abstract

This document describes techniques for allowing sites running the Locator/ID Separation Protocol (LISP) to interoperate with Internet sites that may be using either IPv4, IPv6, or both but that are not running LISP. A fundamental property of LISP-speaking sites is that they use Endpoint Identifiers (EIDs), rather than traditional IP addresses, in the source and destination fields of all traffic they emit or receive. While EIDs are syntactically identical to IPv4 or IPv6 addresses, normally routes to them are not carried in the global routing system, so an interoperability mechanism is needed for non- LISP-speaking sites to exchange traffic with LISP-speaking sites. This document introduces three such mechanisms. The first uses a new network element, the LISP Proxy Ingress Tunnel Router (Proxy-ITR), to act as an intermediate LISP Ingress Tunnel Router (ITR) for non-LISP- speaking hosts. Second, this document adds Network Address Translation (NAT) functionality to LISP ITRs and LISP Egress Tunnel Routers (ETRs) to substitute routable IP addresses for non-routable EIDs. Finally, this document introduces the Proxy Egress Tunnel Router (Proxy-ETR) to handle cases where a LISP ITR cannot send packets to non-LISP sites without encapsulation. This document defines an Experimental Protocol for the Internet community.