Recently RRX Network was conducting a preliminary study of possible upgrades to the Internet Route Registry (IRR) system.

Some of the possibilities were to include web services based protocols of various forms.

The current next generation IRR (ngIRR) web interface developed for CA*net4 and available for gigapop integration world wide, is based mainly on Java and XML using Java server pages.

Some test case web services for network element control have already been ported to a prototype next generation IRR successfully.

Preliminary upgrade considerations:

• 9k MTU route maps
• multicast automation
• visualization enhancement
• IPv6 router programming
• lambda switching support

A gigapop engineer, or possibly proxy of some form registers Route Policy Specification Language (RPSL) "objects" in the RR database.

Information once registered in the system can be queried by neighboring gigapops, or used to generate router or firewall configurations, by iteratively issuing queries from a script.