Re: draft-ietf-multi6-multihoming-requirements-03

[Tim Chown <tjc@ecs.soton.ac.uk>]

On Thu, 27 Jun 2002, Iljitsch van Beijnum wrote:

> I don't think this will be much of a problem in practice. If traffic
> reaching the "multihomer/load balancer" doesn't have a code point yet, the
> multihomer will have to set in order to achieve load balancing. For
> instance, if there is an OC3 low delay circuit and an OC12 high delay
> circuit, it may set the a code point that has the effect the OC3 circuit
> is selected for 20% of all packets, and another code point that has the
> effect the OC12 circuit is selected for the remaining 80% of all packets.

I assume from this discussion that there is little hope that schemes
such as Scavenger (less than best effort) will become widely used outside
of the academic research networks?  Such schemes have the attraction that
there is no deployment effort required per se except that DSCP values
should be passed unaltered if the intervening network does not utilise
the DSCP (which is not uncommon where currently the academic backbone
networks are not congested, but the MANs and edges are).  I see no reason
why IPv6 and LBE couldn't be used together, but an IPv6 multihoming model
based on DSCPs would break this.  What's the current stance on global
significance of DSCP values (in this instance, Scavenger uses DSCP 8, a
value adopted by US and European research networks).
 
Tim