1 The Paths Towards IPv6 Multihoming Cedric´ de Launois∗ and Marcelo Bagnuloy ∗Universite´ catholique de Louvain (UCL), Belgium http://www.info.ucl.ac.be
[email protected] yUniversidad Carlos III de Madrid (UC3M), Spain http://www.it.uc3m.es
[email protected] Abstract— Multihoming, the practice of connecting to multiple multihomed in IPv6, even end users with multiple interfaces providers, is becoming highly popular. Due to the growth of to GSM, UMTS, or 802.11 networks. the BGP routing tables in the Internet, the way to get multi- The traditional approach for multihoming in IPv4 is to an- homed in IPv6 is required to allow route aggregation in order to preserve the scalability of the interdomain routing system. nounce, using BGP, a single site prefix to each provider. When After several years of development, the IETF and the research multihoming with BGP, the site can use provider-independent community propose drastic changes in how site multihoming shall (PI) addresses or provider-aggregatable (PA) addresses. be achieved in IPv6. Those changes will potentially affect the fundamental multihoming mechanism, as well as intradomain routing, traffic engineering and even the behaviour of hosts A. Multihoming with PI addresses within the multihomed site. This paper presents the required functionalities and the constraints imposed to the solutions to the IPv6 multihoming problem. It surveys the main multihoming approaches that have been proposed to the IETF over the period 2000 - 2005. It proposes a taxonomy, and compares the solutions according to their mechanisms, benefits and drawbacks. This survey also outlines the major steps that have led to a new multihoming architecture for IPv6.