An incremental approach to IPv6 multihoming

Abstract

The availability of two or more connectivity providers (configuration known as multihoming) allows improvements in failure tolerance and enables traffic engineering capabilities. Current IPv4 multihoming solutions suffer from scalability limitations. In this article we present a solution that allow IPv6 networks to benefit from multihoming, taking advantage from the fact that each provider delegates its own set of addresses. The proposed solution consists in multiple mechanisms that provide different benefits to the multihomed site. More precisely, the solution includes a mechanism for the provision of ingress filtering compatibility, a mechanism for establishing new communications after an outage, a set of tools for traffic engineering and a protocol for preserving established communications through outages. In addition we propose a roadmap for the incremental deployment of the set of mechanisms included in the solution based on the trade-off between deployment effort required by each mechanism and the benefits obtained by the involved party. q

Multihoming aware optimization mechanism

“…resilience, ubiquity, load sharing, and flow distribution). This approach of analysing multihoming support is more objective than other approaches that use only one metric, such as cost [Richard, 2010], or which focus only on a subset of multihoming protocols, such as [Shinta et al, 2006;de Launois and Bagnulo, 2006;Fekete and Hämälänen, 2009]. The following paragraphs, present the outline of each section, in the chapter.…”

“…Multiaddressing, for example, corresponds to a configuration in which multiple addresses are assigned to a given host based on prefixes advertised in different connections [Bagnulo et al, 2006]. Overlapping networks correspond to networks that are configured in a way that there is a common area of coverage.…”

“…Multihoming is a term, often associated (and confused) with multiaccess, multiaddressing, overlapping networks and multi-interface nodes terms [Bagnulo et al, 2006].…”

“…a node with multiple prefixes in the home network, MIPv6 does not support new addresses acting as the home address. Even if binding update messages convey information in advance about alternative prefixes [de Launois and Bagnulo, 2006], this may not be enough to enable session survivability, as MIPv6 procedures fail, since they rely on a single address. Considering the decreased multihoming support, several extensions have been specified to enhance the MIPv6 protocol.…”

“…When evaluating such multihoming support, researchers analyse multihoming support restricted to a single metric, such as cost [Richard, 2010], or focus their analysis in a small subset of multihoming protocols [Shinta et al, 2006;de Launois and Bagnulo, 2006;Fekete and Hämälänen, 2009], therefore, being restricted to a certain type of multihoming (e.g. end-host multihoming).…”