ietf
[Top] [All Lists]

Re: Why is IPv6 a must?

2001-11-12 16:00:03
Perry Metzger writes:

| You seem to dismiss link state offhand, but it
| isn't clear that link state couldn't help out a lot here. (Neither is
| it clear that it could but it appears to be an interesting area for
| some experiments.)

Actually, I'm a fan of link state (ask Sue Hares or Dave Ward & company),
but unfortunately there are lots of links in the Internet, so you
have to hide them.  If you don't, your graph-sort takes forever.

This link-hiding implies lots of levels [Kleinrock & Kamoun], which means 
that either you have the same problem as Geoff in his most recent message
(i.e., you have to do a lookup and keep the result along with the
packet, or lots of lookups, or both), or you need a way to encode
per-level information in the address such that it looks something
like [<L1-address>.<L2-address>.<L3-address>...<LN-address>].  

The problem is that 128 bits or about 64 bits, depending on what
semantics you put onto the addresses, is not very much room to
encode *anything near* the number of levels K&K hierarchical network
optimality calls for in the Internet, let alone the sort of disjoint
hierarchies and confederations thereof that one would want in a
more policy-rich Internet.   But, a variable-length field means
new syntax means it's not IPv6 or IPv4 at all.

        Sean.



<Prev in Thread] Current Thread [Next in Thread>