IPP Routing Architecture

This paper describes the structure of the IPP routing architecture. IPP is an evolution of the TCP-IP protocol. The main advantage of IPP is the variable length addressing scheme. An IPP address can be fifteen bytes long and is optimised for local area networks. The logical structure of the address is very similar to IP, with the main difference that each byte specifies a subnet, apart from the last byte, that indicates a host. Routing speed is maximized by the fact that all routing tables are accessed using a direct lookup method. The size of the routing tables within a router is fixed and small. The above two points allow the construction of very cheap and fast routers. This routing architecture supports broadcast, multicast and real time data. It uses different routing priorities for each type of service. This results in a better management of network links. For normal network traffic the link usage is maximised by automatically load balancing the usage of available links. A working router can be found in the part of the document describing the tests done on this architecture. IPP aims to keep all the other qualities of IP, e.g., the method used to manage flow control, resequencing, etc. The only things that change are the structure of an address, the routing table and routing functions.