Support for Host Anycast, Priorities and Naming of Link Local Addresses in IPv6


Growth of the Internet raised issues that were not envisaged during design of its underlying protocol. Internet Protocol version 4 is faced with the twin problems of lack of scalability and flexibility. Efforts are ongoing in the design of next generation Internet Protocol (Ipv6) that overcomes these drawbacks and provides future safe extensions. The base protocol and various supporting protocols have been standardized.

Additionally various issues are being worked on and of experimental nature. We have studied and implemented three such issues - support for host based anycast addressing, support for priority based traffic classes, and a name service for page link local addresses. These required modifications at various layers of IPv6 stack - device, network, transport, BSD API, and application layers. The implementation can be used for experimenting with these issues to enable a better understanding of their feasibility and for tuning to individual requirements. These mechanisms were implemented and tested on a Linux 2.1.21 based IPv6 stack.