Re: IPv6 adoption
On Sun, 16 Jul 2000, Mika Liljeberg wrote:
> There are 340 282 366 920 938 463 463 374 607 431 768 211 456 IPv6
> addresses. That's roughly 313 million addresses per every cubic
> millimeter of Earth. Granted, the address space is sparse, but I
> still think it's quite a lot.
The point here is not that there are alot of addresses, but that routing
information is stored in the address!
For instance, if you have a router that goes from a leased line to
ethernet then it no longer needs ARP at all, it just rips the lower 64
bits off the incoming packet it and slaps it onto the ethernet header
[with a bit of mangling to go from EUI-64 to MAC].
Things are similar at all layers of the network, straight through to the
frame relay, ATM and SONET layers, AFAIK.
Another simple example is one of the IPv6 in v4 auto tunnel proposals. The
idea is to encode the IPv4 address of the border gateway in the sites
IPv6 prefix, this way any other site who wanted to talk to this one could
do so without doing a IPv6 routing lookup - automatic tunnels.
I've heard it is yet to be shown how well the other 61 bits of global
routing information will work, the general idea was to encode broad
routing information so that backbone routing tables could be made much
smaller..
Jason
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