Re: WG next steps

[Brian E Carpenter <brian@hursley.ibm.com>]

Iljitsch van Beijnum wrote:
> 
> On Mon, 18 Nov 2002, Brian E Carpenter wrote:
> 
> > > > Do we think it is worthwhile to continue down the network/routing based
> > > > solutions? The lack of feedback on my draft suggests people aren't very
> > > > interested in working on this. If we want to do this at the routing
> > > > level, we have start exploring less obvious stuff. For instance, using
> > > > the flow label or diffserv code points to swim across the default zone
> > > > towards a network that knows more specific routing information.
> 
> > The DSCP is definitely not available for that; please read RFC 2474.
> 
> Can you be more specific?

Not really. If you don't want to read the diffserv Proposed Standard,
you'll have to believe me: the DSCP isn't available to solve the
multihoming requirement.

> 
> > I would be amazed if the flow label became available for that. We do have
> > clear consensus in IPv6 that it's an immutable e2e field.
> 
> What we'd need for something like this is a field in the header (well,
> it could be in an option but that increases overhead) that routers could
> look at when making routing decisions, but can be changed without
> breaking higher layers. Being able to change the field en route would be
> useful but may not be absolutely necessary.

You can always propose an extension header for this. However, I doubt
if it would have any substantial advantage over an encapsulation
mechanism.

     Brian