Lecture 9: IP variations: IPv6, multicast,

anycast
 Reminder: Mid-term on Thursday
• Open book, open notes
• No electronic devices allowed
• Covers all material up to lecture 9 (today)
• Comments on kinds of problems
 Overview
• Next generation IP: IPv6
• IP multicast
• IP anycast
• Practical considerations throughout
 I think we have a problem

- Projected use of /8 blocks

- From “A Pragmatic Report on IPv4 Address Space
Consumption,” Tony Main, Cisco Systems.
 IPv6
• Work started in 1994
• Basic protocol published in 1998 (RFC 2460)
• Brief lull, the progress in 2003-6
• Hard push within IETF today for adoption
 IPv6 Key Features
• 128 bit addresses
- Autoconfiguration

• Simplifies basic packet format through extension

headers
- 40 byte “base” header
- Make uncommonly used fields optional

• Security and authentication

 IPv6 Header

Ver Class Flow

Length Next Hdr. Hop limit

Source
(16 octets, 128 bits)

Destination
(16 octets, 128 bits)
 IPv6 Header Fields
• Version, 4 bits: 6 for IPv6
• Class: 8 bits: like TOSS in IPv4
• Flow, 20 bits: identifies a flow
• Length, 16 bits: datagram length
• Next header, 8 bits: more later
• Hop limit, 8 bits: like TTL in IPv4
• Addresses: 128 bits
 IPv6 Addresses
• Simplify DHCP and autoconfiguration
• Break 128 bits into 80-bit network and 48-bit
interface
- Many link layers have unique interface addresses (more on
this later in quarter)
- E.g., Ethernet is 48 bits
- Use of 48-bit ID ensures no address collisions, makes DHCP
stateless
 v4 Interoperability
• RFC 4291
• Every IPv4 address has an associated IPv6 address
• Simply prefix 32-bit IPv4 address with 96 bits of 0

0000 x 12
IPv4 address
 v4 Interoperability, continued
• Two IPv6 endpoints must both have IPv6 stacks
• What about transit network?
• v6 - v6 - v6 (no problem)
• v4 - v4 - v4 (no problem)
• v4 - v6 - v4 (no problem)
• v6 - v4 - v6 (uh-oh)
 6-4-6 Example

A D1 IPv4 D2 B
6 4 4 6
 IP Tunneling
• Encapsulate an IP packet inside another IP packet
• Makes an end-to-end path look like a single IP hop

IPv4 Header

IPv6 Packet IPv6 Packet

 6-4-6 Example, Revisited

A D1 IPv4 D2 B
6 4 4 6
 Other Tunneling Use: VPN
• Virtual Private Networks
• Use case: two distance corporate offices
- Want to access each other’s internal networks
- Make it looks like they’re the actually one network

• Set up an encrypted TCP stream between one host

at each network
• Route packets to other office through this host
• If addresses are all private, network is private
 Extension Headers
• Two types: destination and hop-by-hop
• Both have a next header byte
• Destination headers: intended for IP endpoint
- Fragment header
- Routing header (loose source routing)

• Hop-by-hop headers: processed by each node

- Jumbogram: packet is up to 232 bytes long
 Example Next Header Values
• 0: Hop-by-hop header
• 1: ICMPv4
• 4: IPv4
• 6: TCP
• 17: UDP
• 41: IPv6
• 43: Routing header
• 44: Fragmentation header
• 58: ICMPv6
 MTU Requirement
• IPv4 requires a 576-byte link MTU
• IPv6 requires 1280-byte MTU
• If link MTU is smaller, then it MUST support
sub-IP fragmentation and assembly to provide a
1280-byte MTU
• It SHOULD provide a 1500-byte MTU; nodes
MUST receive 1500 byte packets
 Fragmentation Revisited
• High-loss links (e.g., wireless) can be a problem
• 10-hop route, each link has a 10% drop rate (90%
success rate)
- Probability one fragment arrives is 0.910 ≈ 35%
- Each fragment is transmitted
1 + 0.9 + 0.92 + 0.93 ...0.99 ≈ 6.5 times along the route
- 100% chance on first hop, 90% on second hop, 81% on third
hop, etc.
 Fragmentation Revisited, Continued
• If a packet has four fragments, delivery
probability is 0.354 ≈ 1.4%
1 P9 i
• Total transmissions/delivery = 0.014
· i=0 0.9
• Total transmissions/delivery = 65 · 6.5 = 423
• Fragmentation header in IPv6 is a destination
header
- Fragmentation is possible, but must be done at the source
 Link-layer reliability
• High-loss link layers usually have single-hop acks
and retransmissions
- End-to-end argument: when can layer 2 reliability fail
end-to-end?

• 10-hop route, each link has a 10% drop rate

1
- Expect 0.9 ≈ 1.1 transmissions/link
- 10 links, 11 transmissions
- 44 transmissions/delivery
 Practical Considerations
• IPv6 is only partially deployed
• No “killer app”
• It’s really expensive to replace everything!
• No switch day: IPv4 will always live on
• Multihoming and address fragmentation is
causing routing tables to grow very large
- IPv6 will make this much, much worse...
 Flaw in the Argument
• Original IPv6 motivation was “IPv4 addresses will
run out”
• Addresses are a resource; they have a value (you
don’t run out of land)
• NATs allow multiple nodes to share an IPv4
address
• IPv6 will become the default when IPv4 addresses
are so expensive that it’s cheaper to deploy IPv6
• IETF T-shirt: 32 + 16 > 128
 6lowpan
• IETF working group on IPv6 for low-power
personal area networks (PANs)
• Tiny, energy constrained, wireless devices: smart
homes, ubiquitous computing
• Link layers have tiny MTUs: (802.15.4 is 127 bytes)
• RFC 4944
 6lowpan Header Compression
• 6lowpan tries to compress common cases: TCP,
UDP, etc.
• Example: address compression
- 6lowpan must allow full 128-bit addresses
- Address fields alone are 32 bytes!
- But often they can be shortened...
 6lowpan Header Compression
• draft-ietf-6lowpan-hc-06 (updates RFC 4944)
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1 2 3 4 5
+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+
| 0 | 1 | 1 | TF |NH | HLIM |CID|SAC| SAM | M |DAC| DAM |
+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+
 6lowpan Compression Flags
• SAC: Stateful address compression
• DAC: Statement destination compression
• SAM/DAM: compression scheme used, for
stateless:
- 00: Full 128 bit address
- 01: 64-bit address, other 64 are link-local prefix padded
with zeros
- 10: 16-bit address, other 112 are as above
- 00: 0-bit address, 64-bit link local prefix + 64-bit link layer
address
2-minute stretch
 Multicast
• Problem: want to send a packet to many nodes
- Examples: IP-TV, large audio stream

• Using n unicast packets means the same packet

can traverse a single link many times

src Internet gw a

a
 Multicast Approach
• Nodes can join a multicast group
• Denoted by a multicast IP address
• Routers build a routing topology
- Link state vs. distance vector

• IGMP: Internet Group Management Protocol

- Protocol for hosts to manage membership in multicast
groups
- Hosts talk to local multicast routers
 Example: Link State Tree
• Routers exchange link state
• Node advertise presence in group
• Routers compute shortest-path multicast tree
• Very expensive!
 Network Topology
B

A R1 R2

R3 R4 R5

C R6 R7
 Tree for A as Multicast Source
B

A R1 R2

R3 R4 R5

C R6 R7
 Tree for B as Multicast Source
B

A R1 R2

R3 R4 R5

C R6 R7
 Practical considerations
• Multicast protocols end up being very complex
• Introduce a lot of router state
• Turned off on most routers
• Used within a domain, not between domains
• How does one handle congestion control?
 Anycast
• Communicate with “any” one of a set of nodes
• We’ve seen this with DNS
\$ dig www.google.com
...
;; ANSWER SECTION:
www.google.com. 604799 IN CNAME www.l.google.com.
www.l.google.com. 300 IN A 74.125.19.103
www.l.google.com. 300 IN A 74.125.19.104
www.l.google.com. 300 IN A 74.125.19.147
www.l.google.com. 300 IN A 74.125.19.99
 Anycast at IP layer
• DNS allows anycast through name → address
mappings
• Sometimes we need it at layer 3 itself
- Single IP address refers to multiple hosts
- Need to talk to any one of them

• Example: DNS root servers

- Would like to scale number of root servers with Internet
- Can’t use DNS (remember root servers hard-coded)
- Want to query closest root server
 Anycast in Forwarding Tablse
• Remember, forwarding is longest-prefix-match
• An anycast address is a /32 address
• A single router may have multiple entries for the
address
• Anycast best used in services where separate
packets might go to different destinations
 The Cost
• A /32 routing entry!
• Multiple /32 routing entries!
 Further Advantages
• Geographic scoping
• Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS)
- Since anycast is at IP layer, load from DDoS is distributed
across many anycast nodes

• F root server made anycast in 2002, now 12

locations
 Overview
• Next generation IP: IPv6
• IP multicast
• IP anycast
• Practical considerations throughout
• Next lecture: review
• After midterm: DCCP and NATs