Re: Flow label and its uses

[Fred Baker <fred@cisco.com>]

I'd encourage you to look at the big-internet archives (if they  
exist) from about 1993. The flow label was proposed to support the  
nimrod architecture, and in essence *was* what we later described as  
"MPLS", but in the IPv6 header. That's one of the reasons that the  
flow label isn't covered by the IPSEC checksum - so it could be  
managed appropriately at ingress and egress to the various "flows" or  
"LSPs".

Yes, there has been a lot of water under that bridge. Between  
requiring the flow label to pass unchanged and making the address  
fixed length and of the same construction as the IPv4 address, Nimrod  
became very difficult to implement in IPv6, and Noel still isn't very  
happy with the IPv6 community.

On Jan 17, 2006, at 3:11 PM, Bora Akyol wrote:

> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: Vishwas Manral [mailto:Vishwas@sinett.com]
>
> > And a more recent draft
> > http://www.faqs.org/ftp/pub/internet-drafts/draft-chakravorty-
> > bcc-flowla
> > bel-00.txt
>
> This last one looks a lot like MPLS in IPv6 ;-)
>
> Bora