7.1 INTRODUCTION

This chapter illustrates an alternative to the addressing architecture for IPv6, which maintains global routing expansion. IPv6 demonstrates an important advancement in Internet technology. It yields bigger addresses and much needed functional capabilities, which is intended to be a platform for the growth of the Internet.

The existing IPv6 addressing still relies heavily upon CIDR-style aggregation for route growth control. Unlike IPv4, this IPv6 method is linked with support for simpler network renumbering as this makes it possible for provider-based addressing to happen.

For the most part, the existing IPv6 addressing model is not sufficient because CIDR-style aggregation decomposes as the multi-homed sites such as leaf sites or regional networks increasingly grow. The method of renumbering to achieve changing ISPs (e.g., topological rehoming) is a difficult problem that will only increase.

The bigger IPv6 addresses provide for huge growth in the amount of end systems which can be supported. In addition, it is predicted that there will be a large growth in the number of routes needed to reach them. Should CIDR aggregation increase, as per existing models, this will present a critical problem due to the scaling actions of the global route computations.

This chapter looks at a new aspect of dealing with 16 byte IPv6 address that alleviates the route scaling problem as well as several other related matters. This model yields an aggressive topological aggregation while regulating the complexity of flat-routed regions. It utilizes and handles the dynamic address designation capabilities in IPv6. However, this...