Kademlia-directed ID-based Routing Architecture (KIRA)#

Roland Bless (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology) — individual draft, intended Experimental

• Why: A genuinely different routing architecture rather than an increment: zero-touch, ID-based control-plane routing that scales to hundreds of thousands of nodes with no hierarchy and no manual configuration. Not deployable tomorrow, but the clearest signal in the program of where autonomic-networking research is heading — and a notable data point in the "control planes shouldn't depend on the data plane they're configuring" argument.
• What: A two-tier architecture. The Routing Tier runs R²/Kad — a recursive Kademlia over self-assigned, topologically independent 112-bit NodeIDs with the XOR metric: k-bucket routing tables that grow O(log n), source routing between overlay hops, Proximity Neighbor Selection preferring short paths, overhearing of transit messages, periodic path probing, and loop-free operation even during convergence. The Forwarding Tier uses PathIDs (hashes of path-segment NodeID sequences) as label-like forwarding state, encapsulated over SRv6, IPv6-in-IPv6, or GRE — reusing existing IPv6 forwarding hardware. Add-ons include a built-in DHT for name resolution and the KeLLy topology discovery service; a domain concept provides administrative grouping; an end-system mode supports non-routing participants.
• How: The explicit trade is path stretch for tiny routing tables and extreme resilience — the design goal is to never lose control-plane connectivity to a reachable device, accepting stretched paths as the price. Failure recovery is error-triggered rediscovery with NotViaList exclusion of failed links, not flooding.
• Where applicable: Control-plane and management networks, autonomic networking, disaster-resilient infrastructure — explicitly not a data-plane replacement. Long-running individual draft (-06) with academic grounding; read it as architecture research with a reference protocol spec, not a deployment candidate.