One document matched: draft-hain-ipv6-pi-addr-use-03.txt

Differences from draft-hain-ipv6-pi-addr-use-02.txt



        Multi-6                                                              
        Internet Draft                                               T. Hain 
        Document: draft-hain-ipv6-pi-addr-use-03.txt                   Cisco 
        Expires: March 2003                                   September 2002 
         
         
                Application and Use of the IPv6 Provider Independent  
                            Global Unicast Address Format 
      
     Status of this Memo 
      
        This document is an Internet-Draft and is in full conformance with 
        all provisions of Section 10 of RFC2026 [1].  
         
        Internet-Drafts are working documents of the Internet Engineering 
        Task Force (IETF), its areas, and its working groups.  Note that      
        other groups may also distribute working documents as Internet-
        Drafts. 
         
        Internet-Drafts are draft documents valid for a maximum of six 
        months and may be updated, replaced, or obsoleted by other documents 
        at any time.  It is inappropriate to use Internet-Drafts as 
        reference material or to cite them other than as "work in progress." 
         
        The list of current Internet-Drafts can be accessed at 
             http://www.ietf.org/ietf/1id-abstracts.txt 
        The list of Internet-Draft Shadow Directories can be accessed at 
             http://www.ietf.org/shadow.html. 
         
     Abstract 
         
        This document discusses the expected use of the Provider Independent 
        address format discussed in the companion document GEO [2] in the 
        Internet. In addition to covering implementations where it adds 
        value in managing the growth of the Internet routing tables, the 
        document will discuss implementations that should be avoided due to 
        the negative impact on the routing tables.  
         
     Conventions used in this document 
         
        The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT", 
        "SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED",  "MAY", and "OPTIONAL" in 
        this document are to be interpreted as described in RFC-2119 [3]. 











       
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        Status of this Memo...............................................1 
        Abstract..........................................................1 
        Conventions used in this document.................................1 
        Introduction......................................................3 
        History...........................................................3 
        Site requirements to be provider independent and multi-home:......4 
           Site scale......................................................5 
        Current realities.................................................6 
           Service provider business issues................................6 
           Operational issues..............................................6 
        Applicability of the PI format....................................7 
           Overview of the IPv6 PI Address Format..........................8 
           Constructive implementations....................................9 
           Troublesome implementations....................................10 
        Fundamental Issues...............................................11 
           Routing issues.................................................11 
              Example 1:..................................................12 
              Example 2:..................................................13 
              Example 3:..................................................14 
        Exchange Issues..................................................14 
           Placement......................................................15 
           Engineering considerations.....................................17 
        Observations and Considerations..................................18 
           Address Selection..............................................18 
           Path Selection.................................................19 
           Partitioning...................................................20 
           Renumbering....................................................20 
           Relationship to telephony addressing model.....................21 
           General Considerations.........................................21 
        Recommendations..................................................22 
        RFC Editor Considerations........................................23 
        Security Considerations..........................................24 
        Relationship to Multi-6 WG multi-homing requirements.............24 
           Redundancy û...................................................24 
           Load Sharing û.................................................24 
           Performance û..................................................24 
           Policy û.......................................................24 
           Simplicity û...................................................25 
           Transport-Layer Survivability û................................25 
           Scalability û..................................................25 
           Impact on Routers û............................................25 
           Impact on Hosts û..............................................25 
           Interaction between hosts & routing system û...................25 
           Operations and Management û....................................26 
        References.......................................................27 
        Acknowledgments..................................................26 
        Author's Addresses...............................................27 
               



          
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     Introduction 
         
        This document discusses the application of the Provider Independent 
        (PI) global unicast address format for the IPv6 address assignment. 
        This address format is based on WGS-84 [4] derived geographic 
        location. Historically there have been many debates about the value 
        of geographic versus provider based allocation schemes. One 
        interesting observation about this debate is the overriding 
        assumption that the Internet will have to be built using one or the 
        other rather than leveraging the strengths of each in context. The 
        intent here is not to reopen that debate, but to present the case 
        that with the multiple address capabilities of IPv6 the approaches 
        can be used in a complementary manner.  
         
        Several global enterprise managers have expressed the opinion that 
        the current IPv6 Provider Aggregate (PA) addressing schema is 
        unusable by anyone except Internet providers trying to serve the 
        household and small business market. There is a strong perception 
        that additional mechanisms will be required to address the needs of 
        large multi-continent organizations. The current PA focus on route 
        aggregation, deals with the technical problems of memory and CPU 
        resource consumption when site attachments conform to the model, but 
        the other significant business issues related to provider 
        independence remain open. In any case, a site that is expressing an 
        explicit routing policy into the DFZ will have full-length prefixes 
        announced. The PI address format discussed here does not remove that 
        issue, but this document provides a recommendation as to which 
        announcements can be ignored. 
         
        It is frequently assumed that any address format that is not based 
        on provider aggregation will degenerate into the 'swamp' that came 
        to describe pre-CIDR IPv4, with the result that the routing table 
        grows unabated. The goal of this scheme is to allow sites to be 
        independent of any provider, while still allowing aggregation for 
        those who do not require explicit global routing policy. As a 
        result, there will need to be consistently applied rules for when a 
        prefix gets aggregated and when it doesn't. These will be discussed 
        in the recommendations section.  
         
        This document will highlight the operational configurations where 
        the PI geographic based addresses provide value in provider 
        independence, as well as those situations where they should be 
        avoided in favor of the current provider aggregate mechanism.  
         
         
     History 
         
        Provider based address aggregation has its roots in the IPv4 routing 
        table growth limiting effort known as CIDR [5]. The basic premise is 
        that routing entries can be summarized in such a way that a large 
        number of sites, which subscribe to the same service provider, 
          
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        generate a single entry in the global inter-provider routing 
        exchange, also known as the Default Free Zone (DFZ). While this 
        works well when sites connect to a single provider, it is inadequate 
        for providing a site with redundant access through multiple service 
        providers. Sites that expect redundant service through an arbitrary 
        number of service providers require the global routing table to 
        carry an explicit entry for the full-length prefix allocated to the 
        site. Traditionally this was accomplished by having a site acquire 
        an address allocation out of the pre-CIDR range of the IPv4 address 
        space, which remained provider independent. Lately this process has 
        evolved into simply arranging with each of the service providers 
        involved for an announcement of the explicit prefix allocated to the 
        site by one of those providers. While the effect on the global 
        routing table is the same in either case, the act of 'punching 
        holes' in provider aggregates increases operational complexity, and 
        makes it very difficult for a site to disconnect from the service 
        provider that allocated the address prefix. 
         
        As noted, the prime motivation for CIDR deployment was reduction on 
        the size of the IPv4 routing table. The mechanism, of aligning site 
        allocations with the provider they attached to, worked well for this 
        purpose, but at the same time was directly contrary to the needs of 
        the site for provider independence. The primary operational 
        motivation for sites to connect to multiple providers and/or regions 
        is resiliency. Other factors that come into play are managing 
        overall cost, and optimizing performance or balancing load. 
        Collectively these issues drive sites away from the nicely 
        structured single-connection hierarchical model that is the 
        foundation of IPv6 Provider Aggregatable [6] allocation. At the same 
        time, due to the evolving state of infrastructure deployments, the 
        concepts of geographic locality and least-cost locality often don't 
        match. The consequence of the collective situation is that no one 
        approach to address allocation will solve the entire set of route 
        scaling problems.  
         
        The goal of the PI address format is restoring the integrity of PA 
        prefix format for use by the single homed sites, while 
        simultaneously providing a scaleable approach for the growing number 
        of multi-homed sites. This is accomplished by relating one of the 
        IPv6 address prefixes of the multi-homed sites to an unambiguous 
        geographic reference point in a way that summarizes well over 
        physical distance. This is not an attempt to have routers understand 
        geography. Rather it is simply a mechanism to allocate address 
        prefixes to sites in a way that can be abstracted into a minimum 
        number of routing table entries from a distance. This approach has a 
        strong advantage over the IPv4 PI space (which is effectively 
        randomly assigned) in that there is a clear structure that allows 
        for efficient abstractions.  
         
         
     Site requirements to be provider independent and multi-home: 
         
          
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        Several issues play into the reasons that sites insist on remaining 
        provider independent leading them to multi-home. Beyond the simple 
        uncertainty that any given service provider will still be in 
        business next month, there have been enough widespread outages of 
        various kinds of service over the years to show that trusting any 
        one provider (who is in turn dependent on device suppliers where a 
        single bug can lead to system-wide outages) is problematic. At the 
        same time, the cost of transmission circuits is low enough that it 
        is frequently less expensive to buy Internet access services from 
        two or more providers than to pay any one of them for premium 
        service (history has also shown that even these premium services 
        fail). So in addition to increasing the robustness of the Internet 
        access, these sites frequently end up with more bandwidth.  
         
        The details are being documented more completely in other current 
        works, but an overview of the requirements would include: 
        Operational reasons: 
          - Insulation from routing instability striking one upstream 
            provider. 
          - Insulation from local-loop/fiber cuts, or central office 
            equipment failures. 
          - Ability to reduce the points at which outages or packet loss can 
            occur. 
          - Ability to reduce the average number of hops between a network 
            and various important sites.  
         
        Business reasons: 
          - Insulation from being held hostage by the ISP when billing or 
            other disputes occur. 
          - The negotiating leverage provided when service provider changes 
            are simply circuit installs and don't involve readdressing. 
          - Risk mitigation to investors and insurers who consider redundant 
            connectivity a business necessity. 
          - Reducing the overhead of continually changing explicitly 
            configured firewalls for inter-enterprise communication. 
         
         
     Site scale  
      
        There are differences between the global enterprise and the small 
        site / telecommuter in terms of multi-homing needs, but not in their 
        goals for provider independence and resiliency. From the perspective 
        that service providers generally prioritize customer restoration 
        (and sometimes the quality of the engineer working the incident) by 
        the size of the circuit, and it would appear that the lowest speed 
        circuits get the worst service. This leads to a state where those 
        with the smallest demand for bandwidth generally perceive the 
        greatest of need to multi-home for reliability. 
         
        Historically many service providers have used access capacity as a 
        rule-of-thumb in distinguishing the difference in multi-homing 
        requirements for these site types, but with the current deployments 
          
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        of gigabit Ethernet over fiber-to-the-home, bandwidth has become an 
        insufficient measure of a multi-homed site's need to express an 
        explicit policy in the DFZ. As a generalization, the small site / 
        telecommuter simply wants to be always available and internally 
        defaults to any available providers, while the global enterprise 
        expresses an explicit prefix policy (for a variety of reasons 
        including traffic management) by participating in the global BGP 
        exchange. This generalization provides a natural (and more accurate) 
        delineation between the types of multi-homed sites, and the PI 
        mechanism described here exploits this operational characteristic to 
        limit table growth.  
         
         
     Current realities 
         
     Service provider business issues  
      
        During the push to deploy IPv4 CIDR, a disconnect developed within 
        the service provider community between the operational goal of 
        minimizing the table size through enforced aggregation, and the 
        business goal of giving the customer the services they demand. Over 
        the short term the demonstrable realities of the routing collapses 
        in 1994 and 1996 allowed the operations team to wield the upper 
        hand. In the end though, the self-indulgent business interests will 
        override the altruistic sentiments of the 'good of the Internet', 
        and organizations eventually realize that bringing money in the door 
        will always trump the operational desire to limit growth. The effect 
        of this has been documented in recent studies [7], which show the 
        routing table growth returning to an exponential rate after a few 
        years of linear growth.   
         
        It is a fairly straightforward process to 'follow the money' and 
        realize that any service provider that wants to survive will 
        propagate a full-length prefix for a customer site into the DFZ. The 
        fundamental reality is that the site paying for service will refuse 
        to let any service provider dictate the business requirements, and 
        the service provider sales staff will respond to that by selling the 
        service that the customer is demanding (in this case, provider 
        independence).  
         
        Further, many service providers consider it a business obligation to 
        supply a full view of the Internet routing table to the customers 
        that request it for load balancing. To accomplish that, the entire 
        set of long prefixes has to be passed everywhere unless the provider 
        resorts to a default route to someone else. This means that with the 
        current routing technology, service providers will be accepting and 
        passing full length site prefixes as long as they are selling the 
        service of a full default-less view to their customers. 
         
         
     Operational issues 
         
          
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        In the current Internet, service providers frequently have 
        conflicting operational objectives for handling traffic; in that 
        they all want the other guy do the work. This is colloquially known 
        as 'hot potato' routing, where the holder of the packet is looking 
        to dump it as early as possible, while the potential receivers are 
        looking to avoid being dumped on as long as possible.  
         
        Since the routers understand policy as described through a longest-
        match algorithm, the 'Dump Early' strategy wants to hear short 
        prefix lengths, while the 'Avoid Being Dumped On' model drives wide 
        distribution of the longest possible prefix. Given this situation it 
        is in the interest of the service provider whose customer is 
        attempting to influence incoming routes to propagate that multi-
        homed site prefix as far as possible. The result of this is that 
        only traffic for customer sites will transit the boundary. At the 
        same time, the holders of the packets on the other side of the DFZ 
        would prefer to filter any long prefixes so they can simply dump 
        packets as quickly as possible.  
         
        The independent policy objective of a global enterprise site then 
        gets injected into this environment of provider conflict. The 
        protocol mechanism for assuring provider independence of a site's 
        specific policies is to distribute the full site prefix list into 
        the DFZ. Since the site's ISP as a receiver is interested in only 
        carrying traffic for that customer, propagating the full length site 
        prefix is not only self-defensive, it is aligned with their mutual 
        business interests.  
         
         
     Applicability of the PI format  
         
        A fair question to ask is; if short prefixes through proxy 
        aggregation make no business sense, what mechanism will constrain 
        routing table growth? Currently a single routing protocol is 
        expected to sort all of the contradictory policies to arrive at a 
        perceived optimum from every perspective. In this conflicted 
        environment we are left with a single entity, the originating 
        Autonomous System (AS) number, which is the basis of the various 
        mechanisms used to describe a policy as applied to the listed set of 
        prefixes. There are currently just under 12,000 AS numbers actively 
        distributed through the global routing system. Of these, ~ 7,000 are 
        the origin AS for a single IPv4 prefix. The set of AS's which are 
        origin for 4 or fewer prefixes is ~ 10,000, and these account for ~ 
        17,000 prefixes. This means ~ 15% of the AS's are origin for ~ 85% 
        of the prefixes in the global table. On average each AS originating 
        5 or more prefixes are expressing policy for around 40 IPv4 
        prefixes. If the IPv4 prefix allocations could be dynamically 
        reclaimed and defragmented completely along provider alignments, the 
        size of the Internet routing table could theoretically be reduced to 
        around 10% of its current size. This would effectively turn back the 
        clock on routing table size concerns by close to 10 years. While not 
        a universal solution, by using the IPv6 PI address format the 
          
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        overwhelming majority of multi-homed organizations could use a 
        single /48 prefix (in effect defragmenting the prefix space), and by 
        taking this path the number of prefixes with a common origin AS 
        would approach 1. Assuming the goal of constraining the routing 
        table growth is simple stability of the routing protocols; as the 
        average number of prefixes per origin moves from 40 toward 1, 
        aggregation of the explicit 'policy defining' PI addresses in the 
        DFZ becomes unnecessary. (A remote leaf network may still use 
        aggregation for internal purposes if details of remote 
        interconnectivity are irrelevant.) Uses of PI addresses that do not 
        attempt to define a global policy will be discussed in the 
        subsequent section on exchanges. 
         
        Accomplishing the goal of limiting table growth would require a 
        slight modification to the registry policy on justification for an 
        AS number. Currently in order to be assigned an ASN, each requesting 
        organization must provide verification that it has one of the 
        following: 
          - A unique routing policy   
          - A multi-homed site 
        This leaves open the opportunity for every multi-homed site 
        (including telecommuters) to express a routing policy by injecting 
        their full prefix into the DFZ. The obvious question is, how many 
        sites really want inbound policy control vs. simple path redundancy 
        and fail-over between their attached providers? Since the 
        fundamental requirement for an AS number in a PA context is really a 
        mechanism for expressing policy independent of the provider, the 
        line about multi-homing becomes an IPv4 artifact and should be 
        removed. 
         
         
     Overview of the IPv6 PI Address Format  
         
        Details of the provider independent address format are provided in 
        the companion document GEO [2]. A high level overview is provided 
        here for local context.  
         
        Addresses defined with the Provider Independent format prefix xxxx 
        (IANA assigned) are by definition *NOT PORTABLE* across changes in 
        geographic location. Entities that expect identifiers to be portable 
        across physical location moves MUST use alternatives such as 
        Provider Aggregatable prefixes or DNS names. At the same time these 
        addresses (being independent of provider) *ARE PORTABLE* between 
        providers.  
         
        Provider Independent addresses are constructed using a bit 
        interleave of the WGS-84 based latitude and longitude of a site. 
        While the available 44-bit field allows for resolution of a grid 
        approximately 10 meters on a side, addressing privacy concerns may 
        require the allocation to be at 40-bits with the expectation that 
        site assignments in that 40 meter grid will be managed by the 
        smallest appropriate local jurisdiction. Accommodating areas of 
          
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        dense population may require that the grid size be increased to 150 
        meters or more to allow a sufficient number of bits in the locally 
        assigned field identifying the specific site. This will allow more 
        flexible assignments for multi-story buildings and business centers 
        with multiple independent sites per geographic grid. Actual 
        assignments within a geographic grid SHOULD be a local 
        jurisdictional issue (matching scope jurisdiction; building owner, 
        community board, local government, etc.), and independent of any 
        service provider. The only rules are that the allocation point MUST 
        be contained within its natural grid (unless it is coming from an 
        adjacent water-body grid), and any overlap must be coordinated. If a 
        grid needs to be expanded to accommodate density, it MUST avoid or 
        otherwise coordinate use of any existing values that fall within its 
        new boundaries. The existing PA registries may choose to play a role 
        in helping to coordinate the actual assignments by providing a 
        public database of the local jurisdictional decisions. 
         
        Specification of the WGS-84 reference point SHOULD be the 
        responsibility of the local jurisdiction (who may defer to the 
        layer-1 service provider for process expediency), and SHOULD 
        represent the physical location of the demarcation point of the 
        layer-1 service. In the case where reference points overlap, the 
        local jurisdiction SHOULD provide coordination over the smallest 
        workable scope.  
         
        In the case where the local jurisdiction also acts as a local 
        service provider to its tenants (ie: hotel, apartment, or high-rise 
        business complex) or is unable to expand the scope through a shorter 
        prefix, it MAY choose to allocate prefix lengths longer than /48, as 
        appropriate for the number and needs of its customers. In any case 
        the allocation MUST NOT exceed 64 bits in length to preserve the 
        Interface ID portion of the address. 
         
         
     Constructive implementations  
      
        The geographic nature of the Provider Independent address format is 
        designed to allocate addresses to sites which aggregate well in 
        direct proportion to the physical distance from the site. It also 
        allows a locally connected site to easily change providers without 
        impacting the nodes or connections within a site.  
         
        In this context, one appropriate use of the Provider Independent 
        address format is a site connecting to multiple providers within a 
        constrained geographic scope such as a city (actual size depends on 
        the local cooperative interconnection between service providers). 
        When used in this way, only those routers providing service within 
        the scope need to know the details about the interconnections, and 
        the global routing table would see a single entry for that scope.  
         
        Another appropriate use of the Provider Independent address format 
        is when a site will be switching service providers. By preferring 
          
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        the Provider Independent address prefix for a period overlapping the 
        switch, a site may be able to maintain connections while the new 
        service is installed and the old removed.  
         
        A third appropriate use would be for an organization providing 
        global content services to provide clients with a proximity hint. 
        The longest match between the list returned from DNS and the PI 
        address of the client should provide the closest physical proximity 
        (though not necessarily the closest topological proximity). One 
        consideration is that for global load-balancing hints to work, all 
        nodes will need to know their PI address even if they never use it 
        in packets. 
         
        Finally, as recognized in RFC 1887 [8], another appropriate use 
        would be for organizations that do not directly connect to or 
        participate in the global Internet (Zero-homed), but do have private 
        links with organizations that are connected. It is necessary for the 
        organization in the middle to be able to differentiate between any 
        privately connected sites and the public Internet, so each of the 
        privately connected sites need to use a unique addresses. This is 
        easiest to accomplish with a globally unique prefix, and since the 
        private site is not connected to an Internet provider, it is 
        unlikely they would be able to do so in a strictly PA environment. 
        By using the PI prefix, there would be no ambiguity. 
         
         
         
     Troublesome implementations 
      
        The PI address format does not provide any benefit to the size of 
        the routing table for sites that require direct connections outside 
        their geographic region. (There will be a benefit to the overall 
        routing system though in the restoration of PA integrity.) As 
        discussed earlier, these sites will require the full /48 prefix to 
        be carried globally, independent of address format type, so if a 
        remote circuit is intended for access to customers of a specific 
        provider, the prefix SHOULD come from the PA space of that provider.  
         
        The Provider Independent address allocation mechanism SHOULD NOT be 
        used by a temporary access network (such as a dial point of 
        presence), because scaling routes to single-homed sites attached 
        this way are best addressed through provider based allocations 
        consistent with Provider Aggregatable [6]. The reasons for this are: 
        1) Temporary access endpoints can not expect to maintain higher-
           layer connections between physical access events, and therefore 
           should be using a Provider Aggregatable allocation to minimize 
           the scope of their impact on the routing system as they come and 
           go.  
        2) The location of the intermittent endpoint is unknown, so the 
           address would have to be based on the access point location. If 
           such an access point were scaled to handle 10,000 attachments it 
           would have to subsume the neighboring addresses for the 2.5 km 
          
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           square it is centered in. Since the currently deployed temporary 
           access points tend to be located in densely populated areas, 
           using them with geographic rather than provider based addresses 
           would have the maximum negative impact.  
         
        A site that is multi-homed by fixed and dial-based access will 
        decide between provider and geographic based addresses based on the 
        relationship between the access paths. If the two paths are to the 
        same provider then PA addressing is most appropriate. If the dial-
        path were to a different provider than the fixed line, it would make 
        more sense to use the PI address, because the site would maintain 
        its prefix and active connections through the routing switch without 
        the need to globally punch a hole in either provider based 
        aggregate.  
         
         
     Fundamental Issues 
         
        There are ongoing debates as to the fundamental problems created by 
        unconstrained routing table growth as the Internet topology 
        flattens. Some of the issues raised in these debates include:  
            Memory size for holding the ever-expanding table 
            Memory to CPU bandwidth for accessing the table contents 
            CPU speed in processing table updates 
            Convergence time as each event results in a burst of processing  
            Inconsistent inter-provider announcement policies 
            The volume of information stored with each prefix 
             Management of a distributed database with insufficient 
             concurrency controls 
          
        While it is clear there are many potential problems, any solutions 
        need to balance these against the costs of equipment capable of 
        solving them. Most service providers will say they want all of these 
        problems solved, but when it comes down to paying for hardware they 
        frequently compromise long-term growth in favor of short-term cost 
        control. As a result, any mechanism or policy needs to take the 
        inconsistency of hardware capabilities into account.  
         
         
     Routing issues 
      
        Given the unstated business motivation of the service provider is to 
        push the longest possible prefix as far as possible, the primary 
        impact on routing becomes one of dealing with the long prefixes of 
        the set of sites expressing global policy. At the same time the 
        routing system needs to be capable of aggregating all the multi-
        homed connections where the only policy is 'stay connected within a 
        region'.  
         
        While the basic mechanism described in GEO [2] is a bit interleave 
        of the WGS-84 latitude and longitude values, the prefix length used 
        by the routing protocols MAY be established on any bit boundary. At 
          
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        the same time, the operational choices will naturally be limited by 
        the requirement for all service providers at that boundary to 
        directly interconnect with all others for traffic delivery. The 
        result is that at some point in the hierarchy all service providers 
        for a scope have to agree on the boundary then share routes and 
        traffic. It becomes an engineering tradeoff between the size of the 
        routing table, and the number of points where interconnections 
        occur.  
         
        From a site perspective  
           - on resiliency, there is a single address block that allows 
             connections to survive any shifts in routing due to provider 
             outages.  
           - on traffic management, the set of address blocks may influence 
             incoming behavior.  
        From a service provider perspective  
           - each site is identified in a subset of its PA space, as well as 
             the PI prefix. 
           - on the DFZ, there will be multiple paths to a given PI prefix, 
             (the intent should be that multiple exist, else PA is the right 
             choice). 
         
        The 'hot potato' routing policies will assume a short prefix 
        represents a contiguous interconnection of providers in a given 
        region.  
         
         
      Example 1:  
        Network DEF provides transit services within Europe. For global 
        connectivity it subscribes to provider ABC. It has local transit 
        agreements with competitive service providers GHI and JKL. The 
        company XYZ is a customer of both DEF and JKL with offices in Paris 
        and Moscow. XYZ policy is to prefer the internal network to the 
        public network.  
         
                                       ------- 
                                      |  ABC  | 
                                       ------- 
                                      /   |      
                               ------  ------  ------ 
                               | DEF |-| GHI |-| JKL | 
                               ------  ------  ------ 
                                 \  '-----------'  / 
                                 ------      ------ 
                                 |XYZ-P|-----|XYZ-M| 
                                 ------      ------ 
                                           
        Route announcement between:  
        XYZ-P & XYZ-M - full PI and PA /48 of the each site 
        XYZ-P & DEF - full PI /48 of this site up; DEF explicit customers 
        ::/0 down  

          
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        XYZ-M & JKL - full PI /48 of this site up; JKL explicit customers 
        ::/0 down 
        DEF & GHI  explicit customers + x296:: of XYZ-M 
        DEF & JKL  explicit customers 
        JKL & GHI  explicit customers + x280:: of XYZ-P 
        DEF & ABC  x280:: up; x::/4 down 
        GHI & ABC  x280:: up; x::/4 down 
        ABC & peers  X280 out; explicit /16s from each 
         
        Nodes in the Paris office of XYZ would use the X296::/16 prefix when 
        talking to sites in the Moscow region, and conversely nodes in the 
        Moscow office would use the X280::/16 prefix when talking to sites 
        around Paris.  
         
        If XYZ opens an office in New York, it would announce each of that 
        site's /48 prefixes to the other two sites, but that should not 
        extend beyond to DEF or JKL. Nodes within the XYZ network SHOULD NOT 
        use the US prefix to talk to nodes in Europe unless the internal 
        connection across the Atlantic is unavailable. In that case, only 
        the New York office nodes would be receiving the local PI prefix so 
        they might choose to use it. If the provider serving the New York 
        office were acquiring its allocation from ABC, the address selection 
        longest match would lead hosts to select PA. 
         
         
      Example 2:  
        ISP-1 prefers connections to region 2 via ISP-2, and accepts the 
        short aggregate over that path. ISP-3 has an arrangement with ISP-1 
        to provide service for its customers over a direct connection 
        between them, and announces it's PA prefix along with the PI 
        specifics of its customers.  
            Sub-scenario 1: 
        The Site uses its Provider Independent address. Customers of ISP-1 
        would use the path via ISP-3 due to the longer prefix announcement. 
        If the link between the Site and ISP-3 failed, ISP-3 would reroute 
        via ISP-4 due to the intra-region announcements. ISP-3 may choose to 
        stop announcing the Site prefix in this case, which would cause ISP-
        1 to route via ISP-2 due to the short region prefix announcement. 
        Connections between ISP-1's customers and the Site would remain 
        intact during these rerouting events. 
            Sub-scenario 2: 
        For cost reasons the Site prefers ISP-4. Implementing the site's 
        preference would require them to use the prefixes from each 
        provider, and then via local policy order the selection rules 
        appropriately. Customers of ISP-1 would not be aware of the site's 
        preferences, and would use their own local policies when initiating 
        connections to decide between the values returned by DNS. 
        Connections between ISP-1's customers and the Site would drop if the 
        connection from ISP-4 to the Site, or ISP-2, failed. 
         
         
                   ------       |      ------ 
          
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                  |ISP-1 |------|-----|ISP-2 |- 
                   ------       |      ------  \ 
                          \     |         |     \ 
                           \    |      ------    \ ------ 
                            ----|-----|ISP-3 |----|ISP-4 | 
                                |      ------      ------ 
                                |           \      / 
                                |            ------ 
                              1 | 2         | Site | 
                                |            ------  
                         Region Boundary 
         
         
      Example 3:  
         
                                       | 
                    ISP-1 ---- ISP-2 --|- ISP-3 - 
                      |   \_     |     |/   |    \ 
                      |     \_   |   _/|    |     Site-2 
                      |       \  |  /  |    |    / 
                    ISP-4 ---- ISP-5 --|- ISP-6 û 
                   /                   | 
            Site-1                     | 
                                 Scope Boundary 
         
        If the link between ISP-3 & ISP-6 failed causing a partition of the 
        scope, specifics announced to ISP-5 could be used to heal. 
         
         
         
     Exchange Issues 
              
        Practical requirements for exchanges include, proximity to the 
        physical cabling infrastructure, diversity of its own physical 
        location and the interconnect capacity between those parts, as well 
        as appropriate scaling to the number and types of customers in the 
        region. As a general rule, an exchange fabric at layer-2 is the most 
        flexible, but the exchange service may also want to provide a layer-
        3 peering aggregator to reduce the number of participants in an N-
        way mesh. 
         
        The general point is that the providers interconnecting the metro 
        areas only need to know the aggregates. To accomplish that there 
        needs to be a common structured exchange point, or subset of routers 
        which know the interconnect detail. As the number of full prefixes 
        (/48) grows, the convergence time of the routing protocol rises. It 
        is assumed that simply for reasons of physical infrastructure scale, 
        before the list of advertisements grows too long, additional 
        exchanges will be established using longer prefix subsets of the 
        established exchange.  
         

          
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        Care must be given to the fact that when an area scope is too large, 
        it may become partitioned by natural terrain based boundaries. In 
        these cases, either the more specific prefix values must be 
        advertised, or the providers involved must carry the specifics 
        necessary to heal the partition. 
         
             Note: exchanges for a scope don't have to be physically located 
             in the scope of interest; they are simply required to have 
             service provider agreement about which scopes are aggregated at 
             specific exchanges 
         
         
     Placement 
         
        With an expansion in the number of multi-homed sites, additional 
        exchanges may need to be built. The decision to do so will be a 
        clear engineering driven decision based on the number of multi-homed 
        sites and the acceptable size of the local routing table. 
        Operational experience shows that over time service providers have 
        deployed exchanges with 40 û 600 km spacing loosely based on 
        connected population density [9] (2-1991 -> ~ 200-2002).  
         
        One reason for the current set of exchanges is the reality that 
        costs have been significant when national boundaries are crossed. 
        While minimizing the size of the table for any given router would 
        drive deployment of exchanges with ever-closer spacing, the cost to 
        providers for connecting to multiple exchanges will act as a natural 
        counter balance to prevent an absurd number of them from being 
        created. The costs for these additional exchanges should be directly 
        mapped back to the multi-homed sites that create the need. Punching 
        holes in PA space leads to a situation where it is difficult to 
        associate the site that creates the routing table growth problem 
        with the point where the pain is felt (the DFZ); but distribution of 
        the PI format prefix creates a mechanism where the providers could 
        point at a specific local cost (the exchange) which supports the 
        goals of a site, and the site could in turn see explicit value for 
        the additional cost. Replacing the current arbitrary inter-provider 
        filtering arrangement with a clear architecture around exchange 
        points will make it easier to explain the costs. 
         
        While cost pressure is going to push back to discourage a massive 
        number of small exchanges, there will be a clear benefit to 
        exchanges covering a large expanse. As a simple example, using an 8-
        bit reference with the PI format, the globe divides into 128 
        regions, with 68 basically unusable (32 are polar, 36 are primarily 
        ocean). Of the remaining 60, 15 map into major population centers. 
        Even if economics only justifies exchanges for the 22 dense 
        population centers listed below, over 300 million people are covered 
        (~5% of global population). Taking the example out to 12 bits (/16) 
        provides additional granularity for those regions where several 
        large population centers already support multiple exchanges, and may 
        simplify operations. Couple this with the likelihood that 
          
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        significant geographic areas are connected through these population 
        centers and there is little immediate need to add additional 
        exchanges. 
         
        Population centers  Prefix          Example Current Exchanges 
           (~10 M people) 
        Sydney      -       X1C0::/12       AUSIX 
        Tokyo, Osaka -      X360::/12       NSPIXP-2, JPIX 
        Seoul       -       X33C::/16       IX, DACOM 
        Beijing     -       X33A::/16       Terramark 
        Shanghai    -       X333::/16       SHIX 
        Manila      -       X310::/12       PHIX, PHNET CORE, HKIX 
        Jakarta     -       X1A0::/12       Napsindo, Sing Tel, KLIX 
        Delhi, Calcutta -   X270::/12       THIX  
        Mumbai      -       X250::/12       EMIX 
        Karachi, Teheran -  X260::/12       Karachi NAP 
        Moscow      -       X290::/12       M9-IX, MPIX 
        Cairo       -       X233::/16       AIX, CyIX 
        Istanbul    -       X23B::/16       TIX 
        London      -       X7D0::/12       LINX  
        Paris       -       X280::/12       PARIX, AMS-IX 
        Sao Paulo   -       X590::/12       Diveo NAP 
        NY          -       X720::/12       MAE-East, NYIIX 
        Mexico City -       X650::/12       Chicago NAP 
        LA          -       X660::/12       MAE-West, MAE-LA 
         
        Some neighboring regions may find it advantageous to leak full 
        prefix lengths between themselves. While a region has a flat routing 
        table, providers in that region can ignore the detail in the 
        majority of the global table. The interconnection robustness at the 
        scale of this example is fairly high, so there is potential for 
        significant gain. Within the vast regions, it becomes a mater of 
        local politics and business practice as to how much further the plan 
        can go, or how additional existing exchanges might be leveraged. 
        Certainly evolving to a structured interconnect model will be more 
        difficult in either Europe or the US than all the others combined, 
        but if those 4 PI regions are written off as hopelessly intertwined, 
        there is still an opportunity for significant gain when the rest of 
        the world is able to ignore the details of that particular mess. 
         
        A further reduction is possible by a split of 32 entries of ::/10 
        for the 45 degree sections aligned in three longitude groupings. 
        Starting with this, the list above would be easy to map into a small 
        set of diversified exchanges. 
         
        London/Amsterdam : Tokyo/Osaka : Sydney : New York/Chicago 
         
        X000::/10   London  90.00000   s    00.00000   e 
        X080::/10   London  45.00000   s    00.00000   e 
        X200::/10   London  00.00000   n    00.00000   e 
        X280::/10   London  45.00000   n    00.00000   e 
        X040::/10   London  90.00000   s    45.00000   e 
          
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        X0C0::/10   London  45.00000   s    45.00000   e 
        X240::/10   London  00.00000   n    45.00000   e 
        X2C0::/10   London  45.00000   n    45.00000   e 
        X100::/10   London  90.00000   s    90.00000   e 
        X180::/10   London  45.00000   s    90.00000   e 
        X300::/10   London  00.00000   n    90.00000   e 
        X380::/10   London  45.00000   n    90.00000   e 
        X140::/10   Sydney  90.00000   s    135.00000   e 
        X1C0::/10   Sydney  45.00000   s    135.00000   e 
        X340::/10   Tokyo   00.00000   n    135.00000   e 
        X3C0::/10   Tokyo   45.00000   n    135.00000   e 
        X400::/10   Sydney  90.00000   s    180.00000   e 
        X480::/10   Sydney  45.00000   s    180.00000   e 
        X600::/10   Tokyo   00.00000   n    180.00000   e 
        X680::/10   Tokyo   45.00000   n    180.00000   e 
        X440::/10   Sydney  90.00000   s    225.00000   e 
        X4C0::/10   Sydney  45.00000   s    225.00000   e 
        X640::/10   Tokyo   00.00000   n    225.00000   e 
        X6C0::/10   Tokyo   45.00000   n    225.00000   e 
        X500::/10   Chicago 90.00000   s    270.00000   e 
        X580::/10   Chicago 45.00000   s    270.00000   e 
        X700::/10   Chicago 00.00000   n    270.00000   e 
        X780::/10   Chicago 45.00000   n    270.00000   e 
        X540::/10   Chicago 90.00000   s    315.00000   e 
        X5C0::/10   Chicago 45.00000   s    315.00000   e 
        X740::/10   Chicago 00.00000   n    315.00000   e 
        X7C0::/10   Chicago 45.00000   n    315.00000   e 
         
         
         
        >-------------------global service providers------------------< 
              |                         |                       | 
              |                         |                       | 
          Asia IX                   Amer IX                 Euro IX 
              |                         |                       | 
              |                         |                       | 
         -----------      regional service providers       ----------- 
          /   |   \                /    |    \              /   |   \ 
         /    |    \              /     |     \            /    |    \ 
          Local IX's                Local IX's              Local IX's 
              |                         |                       | 
              |                         |                       | 
         -----------        local service providers        ----------- 
         
         
     *** Show example of multicast based on prefix as geo alert to emergency 
     crews at a response scene.  
         
         
         
     Engineering considerations 
         
          
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        Many private-peer connections exist to avoid the performance 
        limitations of a shared interconnect. These limitations include both 
        the interconnect fabric, and the access paths between the fabric and 
        the provider network. While not as simple to operate as exchange 
        interconnections, these peering points are an engineering necessity. 
        Fortunately, both interconnect strategies work with the PI address 
        format, as long as the scope of the advertised PI prefix is 
        contiguous.  
         
        One engineering consideration is that the size and location of an 
        exchange have no mandatory relationship to the prefix lengths 
        exchanged there. For example, assume there is a massive exchange in 
        London with 100's of providers participating covering all of the UK, 
        and nearby another exchange, say Moscow, where there may only be 5 
        providers, but they cover all of Russia from a single exchange 
        point. The fact that one has more participants, or covers a region 
        approximately 10 degrees square, while the other covers a region 20 
        x 150 degrees has nothing to do with the number of multi-homed sites 
        supported. A single exchange in each may be inadequate, or may be 
        overkill for the required service. The requirement is that all 
        participants agree on the set of prefixes to be exchanged, and that 
        set will almost assuredly contain multiple lengths to avoid 
        overlapping with a neighboring exchange. The existing Regional 
        Registries for PA format addresses already have the appropriate 
        constituency and fora to act as a catalyst for the necessary 
        agreement on prefixes at each exchange point.  
         
        It should be noted that when a site is directly connected to an 
        exchange, the exchange becomes the logical customer of the transit 
        service providers that tie the exchanges together. In this context 
        the exchange itself appears to be one of the service providers for 
        the regional aggregate. While the current set of exchanges are not 
        likely to scale to support millions of multi-homed sites for a 
        specific scope, in the long-run the location and number of exchanges 
        will evolve to meet the engineering cost/benefit analysis. The 
        design of the PI mechanism allows for the creation of exchanges at 
        the scope that makes local engineering sense, without impact on any 
        other scopes.  
         
         
     Observations and Considerations 
         
     Address Selection 
         
        IPv6 defines the case that nodes will have multiple addresses, so 
        having a PI set as well as potentially several PA sets should not 
        present any particular concerns to the end nodes. The primary 
        technical issue will be limitations in the size of a DNS response 
        packet. Using both the PI and PA prefixes, multi-site networks 
        SHOULD internally advertise all of the appropriate natural prefixes 
        for the connections the network manager is willing to use, then let 
        the host address selection rules [10] sort it out. Due to longest 
          
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        match selection the default rules would result in systems using a 
        source address that most closely matches one for the destination. 
        When the destination is single-homed return traffic would naturally 
        be directed toward the site boundary closest to the destination site 
        (ie: traffic would traverse the public network as little as 
        possible). If this is not the desired behavior, local policy may 
        establish an appropriate set of rules to reorder the end system 
        preferences. 
         
        While broad advertisement of available prefixes provides the most 
        robust infrastructure to the end systems, managers of large multi-
        national organization networks should exercise operational care to 
        administer the distribution scope of any prefix. It is generally 
        unlikely that nodes in a 10,000-seat office complex would be 
        expected to use the local Internet access provided for a 3-person 
        office halfway around the world. When this policy is true, the 
        small-office prefix SHOULD NOT be propagated beyond that local 
        office, because doing so would only clutter and slow the address 
        selection process for the larger segment of the organization's 
        network.  
         
        The longest match algorithm will automatically select between PA and 
        PI prefixes. If the two sites share some part of the provider 
        hierarchy and some degree of geographic locality, it will become a 
        case-by-case issue as to which one is longer. On one hand they may 
        be geographic neighbors using different providers with no 
        relationship in the PA based allocation (longest match rule would 
        cause hosts to select PI based prefix). In the contrasting case, 
        they share the same provider but are on opposing sides of the globe 
        (longest match rule would cause hosts to select PA prefix). While 
        the hosts have no direct access to current topology information, the 
        simple longest match rule for address selection would appear to bias 
        connections toward the most appropriate path. In any case, traffic 
        flow will follow the inter-provider policy perspective of the 
        optimal route. 
         
        In the case where one site is single-homed (therefore using a PA 
        prefix), and the other is multi-homed using PI, the routing system 
        would not particularly care because these are both global unicast 
        prefixes and will be handled appropriately. (Creating this situation 
        presumes that the multi-homed site is not informing its hosts or DNS 
        about any PA prefixes it may have, or has a local policy overriding 
        the default selection rules.) In fact this may be a useful case for 
        a content provider trying to do global load distribution, though it 
        would require the PA node to be aware of its PI prefix, even if it 
        was never used in a packet.  
         
         
     Path Selection 
         
        A frequently asked question is how a source selects the correct 
        first hop when more than one exists? This is actually a multipart 
          
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        question since it involves both the address selection as well as the 
        first hop router selection.  
         
        Many arguments about address selection revolve around the host's 
        knowledge (or lack thereof) about the technically optimum path for 
        the metrics of bit-rate, loss-rate, delay, and jitter, but they 
        generally avoid the topic of actual access cost, which is all the 
        site usually knows. Address selection was dealt with in the previous 
        section, and lacking local policy to the contrary, will be based on 
        longest match between the source and destination. 
         
        A fundamental characteristic of IPv6 hosts is that they will always 
        choose one of the available routers, and expect to be redirected by 
        the routers which actually know at least part of the optimal path. 
        This set of routers for a site will be managed according to local 
        policy and will forward or redirect in that context. While many 
        discussions assume the destination route announcement determines the 
        source's routing; the reality is the source policy has always 
        determined at least the first hop, and intermediate policy (which 
        may ignore any destination policy) may bias the route at any point.  
         
         
     Partitioning 
         
        One of the concerns that aggregation through an exchange raises is 
        the potential for a portion of the local topology to partition. This 
        would effectively create a black hole for sites that are only 
        attached to the disconnected partition. While this is clearly a 
        problem for single-homed sites, those sites will be using PA space 
        and not be subject to the aggregation of PI prefixes. For those 
        multi-homed sites using PI in a metro-aggregate context, their only 
        exposure to partitioning is if all of their providers partition from 
        the set of transit providers at the same time. The potential for 
        simultaneous partition raises the case that any metro 
        interconnection topology could create a single point of failure, 
        which further leads to a strong recommendation that these metro 
        interconnects actually consist of 2 or more interconnected fabrics 
        per scope. The routing implications of this are that the number of 
        BGP peers will increase in proportion to the number of fabrics, but 
        as long as the set of prefixes match they will appear to be one 
        exchange point.  
         
         
     Renumbering 
         
        Even though this address format is derived from geographic 
        information, renumbering is not required as devices move within a 
        network. The only time renumbering becomes a concern is when the 
        layer 1 demarcation for the network changes. In this case all of the 
        attached devices would renumber together. 
         
         
          
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     Relationship to telephony addressing model 
         
        It has been noted that the PI format shares characteristics with the 
        global telephone address plan. While the distribution of prefixes to 
        specific geographic areas would appear to be similar, the telephone 
        environment address space was divvied up in a random way where the 
        resulting provider boundaries happened to align with the political 
        notion of geography at one time. The PI address format is devoid of 
        any political context (beyond agreement on WGS-84 as the reference 
        tool), and allows for structured aggregation at any bit boundary. 
        Unfortunately (as noted in the engineering discussion on exchanges 
        earlier) the cost models for circuits still align with political 
        notions of geography. This situation is expected to ease as the 
        telephony system continues its efforts at deregulation and 
        privatization. The one place where there is a strong similarity 
        between the addressing models is the perspective that some providers 
        operate within a geographic area (routing full-length prefixes), 
        while other providers tie the diverse areas together (routing short 
        area aggregates). This is the fundamental model that allows local 
        detail to be abstracted at a distance.  
         
         
     General Considerations 
         
        One concern raised by enterprise managers is that a /48 might not be 
        enough for some large organizations. Using the PI format, a large 
        organization will have multiple /48's to work with. If their 
        facilities happened to cover a contiguous 150x150 meter square they 
        could have an entire /36 to work with.  
         
        While the IPv6 PI address format is designed to support exchange-
        based aggregation in the context of various scope sizes, it is not 
        dependent on exchanges as a fabric for its overall route aggregation 
        properties. It will provide efficient route aggregation in a global 
        context when providers in a given scope interconnect by whatever 
        means (ie: common third party), such that only the shorter prefix is 
        announced outside that scope. Any provider (including a traditional 
        exchange point route server) announcing a short prefix MUST be able 
        to deliver packets to anywhere in the scope, either directly or 
        through specific arrangements. In the case where a service provider 
        does not interconnect with others in its scope it MUST advertise the 
        longer prefixes associated with its customers.  
         
        It is not likely to happen soon, but in time a few regions may exist 
        with extreme densities (greater than 1M independent multi-homed 
        sites per 10 km grid); where it is not reasonable to expand any 
        given grid to a sufficiently large area to provide enough addresses 
        for local administration. Generally these are expected to be 
        adjacent to sizable regions of water where it is highly unlikely 
        there will ever be permanent Internet service provided. The local 
        jurisdiction for areas of extreme density MAY choose to map a nearby 
        unusable grid onto an area requiring more addresses. When this is 
          
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        done the jurisdiction MUST coordinate with neighbors to avoid 
        duplication, and SHOULD do this in conjunction with the existing 
        Regional Registries to avoid any duplication. 
         
        One characteristic that is frequently overlooked is that geography 
        provides distinguished meaning to the term 'home address'. So a node 
        using Mobile-IPv6 [11] with PI addresses as the home address and the 
        current value from the intermittent access provider for the care-of-
        address could expect to maintain connections across access events. 
        Note this does not mean the geographic address is allocated or even 
        known to the intermittent access point. The routing system doesn't 
        need to know the binding for the geographic address since packets 
        are routed according to the PA care-of-address. The home-agent would 
        need a way to inject its Provider Independent prefix and current 
        binding. This could be a form of tunnel-broker within a region. 
         
         
     Recommendations 
         
        Attempting to balance the conflicting policies of the service 
        provider operations staff, their business staff, each end site, and 
        any additional service providers will require a clear policy that 
        everyone can rely on for consistent packet treatment. As it is not 
        the purview of the IETF to establish operational policy for 
        independent operators, the closest fit is a recommendation in the 
        form known as Best Current Practice. In that context, this document 
        recommends: 
         
        1) that all providers filter out and ignore any announcements that 
           include 5 or more PI prefixes longer than /28, originating from a 
           common AS, where the AS path length is longer than 2.  
         
        2) an AS number be restricted to those who require injecting 
           explicit policy into the DFZ. 
      
        3) metro interconnects actually consist of 2 or more interconnected 
           fabrics per scope. 
         
        Policy 1 allows global enterprise sites which need to inject global 
        policy into the DFZ, to inject up to 4 long prefixes if they can 
        justify to the registries they require an AS number. At the same 
        time it removes the small business and telecommuter announcements 
        from the DFZ because those would have an origin AS from a provider 
        that would most likely be sourcing more than 5 long prefixes.  While 
        it removes those small types of sites from the DFZ, it still allows 
        them a degree of provider independence and resiliency in the metro 
        context.  
         
        Policy 2 removes multi-homing as an independent requirement to 
        acquire an AS number. If the AS number becomes more difficult to 
        acquire through a change in policy, and service providers employ a 
        filter (either at the protocol level /28, or by charging extra per 
          
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                    Application and Use of the IPv6 Provider-     September 
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        prefix) on AS paths longer than 2 where 5 or more PI prefixes share 
        the same origin AS, the growth of the routing table will be slowed 
        to at most 4x the growth in AS allocations. This change in policies 
        would allow the global enterprise to manage its own policies, while 
        avoiding the table explosion that would happen if every small 
        business or telecommuter appeared in the DFZ. This would also allow 
        neighboring service providers in a region to share detailed 
        information about customers using the PI prefix. 
         
        Policy 3 removes the potential for a single point of failure that 
        would be contrary to the goals of multi-homing resiliency. 
         
        It has been noted that the existing inter-provider relationships and 
        settlement models do not align precisely with the concept of 
        regional aggregation that would be the result of the recommended 
        filtering. While this is undoubtedly true, the situation is 
        partially due to the lack of a structured address plan to align 
        with. Other factors that play into the situation are that the 
        perceived costs are not a strict function of distance, and that the 
        industry lacks a rate structure for packet settlement. While the 
        fundamental cost of physical media does have a distance component, 
        the current pricing realities often ignore this. Compounding this 
        situation is the fact that the Internet providers have gone out of 
        their way to avoid hierarchy on one hand, while looking for someone 
        to dump packets to on the other. The resulting relationship 
        complexity could be simplified through packet accounting, but that 
        model runs counter to the current culture that is best described a 
        'shared pain'.  
         
        For the IPv4 Internet, service providers have attempted 
        technological restraint systems through routing filters to varying 
        degrees of success. For the IPv6 Internet the PI address format 
        looks to provide a reasonable tool for aggregation, while allowing 
        well-defined exceptions. Given this environment, economics and human 
        nature will align the interconnect strategies of the service 
        providers over time.  
         
        In any case, deploying a new approach will require a significant 
        number of service providers and sites to agree that these 
        recommendations result in a sustainable business model, which 
        actually lowers overall costs. To reach that goal, the PI address 
        model explicitly trades address consumption for simplicity in the 
        derivation and routing, as well as trades maximal routing efficiency 
        for end-to-end system level efficiency.  
         
     RFC Editor Considerations 
         
        The format prefix X in the examples needs to be replaced by the 
        value assigned by IANA.  
         


          
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     Security Considerations 
      
        While there may be concerns about location privacy raised by the 
        geographic scheme, there is nothing inherent in this address format 
        that would raise any more security considerations than any other 
        global addressing format. If location privacy were an issue it would 
        be wise to avoid this mechanism in favor of location independent 
        mechanisms such as provider based [6] allocations. 
         
         
     Relationship to Multi-6 WG multi-homing requirements 
         
        The multi-homing requirements for IPv6, consistent with current IPv4 
        usage, are detailed in [12]. The capability of the Provider 
        Independent address format to deal with each of the points in that 
        document will be addressed here.  
         
     Redundancy û  
        The Provider Independent address format is designed to provide 
        redundancy between attached providers. By having the site prefix 
        independent of all service providers, link and routing failures in 
        one provider should be completely transparent to the site. The 
        primary case where things may break is a link or routing failure in 
        any part of the path that lacks physical redundancy. 
         
     Load Sharing û 
        This recommendation for specific applications of the Provider 
        Independent address format will allow sites to manage outbound 
        traffic without concern for undue filtering in the routing system. 
        It also allows for load sharing on inbound traffic by large 
        enterprises that can justify expression of policy in the DFZ. 
         
     Performance û 
        The Provider Independent address format allows traffic to arrive 
        from a variety of sources over the set of available paths, but does 
        not explicitly provide for remote flow control. A site may exercise 
        some course level of remote traffic flow management by arrangements 
        for service from multiple providers. At a minimum, traffic from the 
        other customers of an attached provider would follow the site's path 
        through that provider, and not transit any other provider.  
         
     Policy û 
        Traffic class alignment as policy routing is not an IP routing 
        issue, and even using PA addresses can only be accomplished by 
        announcing explicit subnet or host routes. As such the Provider 
        Independent address format will not offer any additional explicit 
        support. Achieving the goal of this bullet is probably best met with 
        a mix of Provider Independent and Provider Aggregatable prefix 
        announcements where the hosts respond to the specific address/port 
        mappings according to local policy. 
         

          
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     Simplicity û 
        The target of the Provider Independent address format is simplicity, 
        both in the method of allocation, and in the routing expectations. 
        From the site perspective, a PI format is what they are after. From 
        the service provider perspective, handling GEO [2] type PI prefixes 
        is no different than IPv4 PI prefixes. The potential increase in 
        complexity over current IPv4 deployments is understanding the impact 
        of using both PI and PA prefixes for a site.  
         
     Transport-Layer Survivability û 
        The Provider Independent address format explicitly deals with 
        transport-layer survivability by isolating the session from the 
        intervening providers. As long as the routing system converges 
        within the timeout period of the transport-layer, any active 
        connections will survive. 
         
     Impact on DNS û 
        There are no modifications required for the Provider Independent 
        address format discussed here.  
         
     Packet Filtering û 
        The Provider Independent address format does not preclude filtering 
        inappropriate packets, and may facilitate such filtering since the 
        location of the demarcation point helps reduce any ambiguity.  
         
     Scalability û 
        No one approach will solve all scalability concerns. An appropriate 
        mix of Provider Independent and Provider Aggregatable address use 
        will solve most concerns without undue complexity in either the host 
        or the routing system. 
         
     Impact on Routers û 
        The impact on routers outside a region is a significantly smaller 
        routing table, both from the reaggregation of the provider prefixes 
        and from the ability to further abstract geographically distant 
        sites. Within a scope, the full routes need to be carried, but this 
        is no worse than the holes punched in provider aggregates, and can 
        be managed through interconnecting at smaller scopes.  
         
     Impact on Hosts û 
        Hosts may have an additional address to select from if the site 
        chose to use advertise both the Provider Independent and Provider 
        Aggregatable formats. Using longest-match rules should easily sort 
        between Provider Independent and Provider Aggregatable prefixes. 
        Hosts may also want to choose to use this as a distinguished form of 
        'Home' address for mobile applications. 
         
     Interaction between hosts & routing system û 
        Routers providing for IPv6 auto-configuration through announcement 
        of the site prefixes may have an additional one in the list, or may 
        simply choose to announce only the Provider Independent prefix. 
         
          
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     Operations and Management û 
        The mechanism for deriving the Provider Independent address is 
        specifically designed to simplify this operations issue by using the 
        globally ubiquitous WGS84 system of measurement. 
         
     Cooperation between Transit Providers û 
        The Provider Independent address mechanism does not require 
        cooperation between service providers specifically for a given 
        multi-homed site. It does require all service providers for a given 
        scope to agree on the boundaries for the scope and any traffic 
        exchange point that might be necessary.  
         
     Multiple Solutions û 
        The Provider Independent address mechanism does not preclude other 
        forms of multi-homing. It does provide a complimentary service to 
        the Provider Aggregatable prefixes for single-homed use, and scales 
        much better than punching holes in those for multi-homed sites. 
         
         
         
     Acknowledgments 
        Discussion threads on the NANOG and IETF/Multi-6 mail lists provided 
        many of the perspectives presented here. Early feedback was provided 
        by Iljitsch van Beijnum, Brian Carpenter, Sean Doran, Geoff Huston, 
        and Pekka Savola.  
         


























          
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     References 
         
         
         
      
        1  RFC-2026,  Bradner, S., "The Internet Standards Process -- 
           Revision 3", BCP 9, RFC 2026, October 1996. 
         
        2  Geo, draft-hain-ipv6-PI-addr-03.txt, Hain, T., "An IPv6 Provider-
           Independent (Geographic Reference) Global Unicast Address 
           Format", Aug 2002. 
         
        3  RFC-2119,  Bradner, S., "Key words for use in RFCs to Indicate 
           Requirement Levels", BCP 14, RFC 2119, March 1997 
         
        4  http://www.wgs84.com/files/wgsman24.pdf 
         
        5  RFC-1518, Rekhter & Li, "An Architecture for IP Address 
           Allocation with CIDR", September 1993 
         
        6  RFC-2374,  Hinden, B., O'Dell, M., Deering, S., "An IPv6 
           Aggregatable Global Unicast Address Format", RFC 2374, July 1998. 
         
        7  http://kahuna.telstra.net/bgp2/as1221/ , G. Huston 
         
        8  RFC-1887, Rekhter, Y., Li, T. "IPv6 Unicast Address Allocation 
           Architecture", December 1995. 
         
        9  http://www.ep.net/ 
         
        10 addr-selection, Draves, R., " Default Address Selection for 
           IPv6", draft-ietf-ipngwg-default-addr-select-04.txt, May 2001. 
         
        11 mobile-ipv6, Johnson, D., Perkins, C., " Mobility Support in 
           IPv6", draft-ietf-mobileip-ipv6-13.txt, November 2000 
         
        12 requirements, Black, et. al., " IP Multihoming Requirements", 
           http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-ietf-multi6-
           multihoming-requirements-03.txt, May 2002 
         
Author's Addresses 
   Tony Hain 
   Cisco Systems 
   500 108th Ave. N.E. Suite 400 
   Bellevue, Wa. 98004 
   Email: alh-ietf@tndh.net 






          
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