Re: The state of IPv6 multihoming development

[Iljitsch van Beijnum <iljitsch@muada.com>]

On Thu, 24 Oct 2002, Tim Chown wrote:

> > I'm talking about just the prefix (presumably, the 48 most significant
> > bits) change and everything else remains the same, so no need to keep
> > state.

> Well, that has been punted around as an idea for some time (8+8 or 6+2+8).

I'm not claiming to have come up with this, let alone that I'd be the
first one. What I have in mind is Michel Py's MHAP draft, although the
part where a multi-addressed host interacts with the MHAP infrastructure
isn't in there, you can blame me for that part.

> e.g. from 1995/6:
> http://www.wcug.wwu.edu/lists/ipng/199612/msg00116.html

On the ipv6mh list we've pretty much disected GSE, which is along the
same lines. While this would certainly make for an interesting new
direction for further development of the IP family, it doesn't actually
solve multihoming while at the same time being so radical it will be
hard to get off the ground.

If we want to move into the direction of separating identifiers and
locators it's probably easier to keep a globally unique and
(potentially) routable IPv6 address as the identifier since that way we
don't need changes to transport protocols and no "flag day".