LMAP: a protocol to automate the setup of logical networks

This paper presents the logical membership announcement protocol (LMAP), a new signaling protocol that handles the construction of logical topologies (e.g. overlay networks) in a straightforward way. LMAP defines both a way to disseminate membership information into the network and a way to determine the adjacencies that must be established between members to create the logical topology. LMAP represents a building block for upper-layer distributed services (e.g. virtual private networks, BGP peering, and more) that rely on a logical topology to achieve their functionality. Moreover, appropriate protocol extensions can be used to transport information that is meaningful only to the service application. This paper presents the key points behind LMAP, it describes how LMAP works, it makes a comparison with other proposals, and it shows some preliminary results proving its robustness and its excellent scalability.