RE: Flow label and its uses

["Bora Akyol" <bora@broadcom.com>]

You are missing nothing.

Frankly, I don't believe in using this field as a locally significant
switching shortcut (like a label in MPLS). We have MPLS, we have VPLS,
we have their ethernet variants using information from the Ethernet
headers. I think we have enough tools to get the job done and we don't
need another tool.

This is why I think we should label this field as Reserved so that if we
run out of bits in the header for other apps, we can use these 20 bits.

Regards

Bora

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Durand, Alain [mailto:Alain_Durand@cable.comcast.com] 
> Sent: Friday, January 20, 2006 4:54 AM
> To: Vishwas@sinett.com; brc@zurich.ibm.com; pekkas@netcore.fi
> Cc: Bora Akyol; fred@cisco.com; v6ops@ops.ietf.org
> Subject: Re: Flow label and its uses
> 
> There is something I never understood about the flow label... 
> In the case someone wants to used it when deep packet 
> inspection is not possible because of IPsec encryption, how 
> can one trust it as this field is NOT protected by IPsec?
> 
> What am I missing?
> 
>    - Alain.