Leveraging Network Performances with IPv6 Multihoming and Multiple
Provider-Dependent Aggregatable Prefixes
Cédric de Launois, Bruno Quoitin and Olivier Bonaventure
Multihoming, the practice of connecting to multiple providers, is
becoming highly popular.
Due to the growth of the BGP routing tables in the Internet,
IPv6 multihoming is required to preserve the scalability of the interdomain
routing system. A proposed method is to assign multiple provider-dependent
aggregatable (PA) IPv6 prefixes to each site, instead of a single
provider-independent (PI) prefix.
This paper shows that the use of multiple PA prefixes per sites not only
allows route aggregation but also can be used to reduce end-to-end delay
by leveraging the Internet path diversity.
We also quantify the gain in path diversity, and show that a dual-homed
stub AS that uses multiple PA prefixes has already a better Internet path
diversity than any multihomed stub AS that uses a single PI prefix,
whatever its number of providers.
We claim that the benefits provided by the use of IPv6 multihoming
with multiple PA prefixes is an opportunity to develop the support for
quality of service and traffic engineering.
To appear in 3rd International Workshop on QoS in Multiservice IP Networks (QoSIP 2005), Catania, Italy, February 2005.
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