An approach to support traffic engineering in IPv6 networks based on IPv6 facilities

Abstract

IPv6 is an Internet protocol with the ability to provide a large number of addresses to allow the connectivity of each existing thing to the global network. It also allows the deployment of many technologies and services of the next generation. One of the major changes that occurred in the IP header with this new version is the addition of the IPv6 flow label field, which was created with the intention of labeling packets that belong to a particular flow to provide an appropriate treatment by routers. However, this field has not been widely exploited yet, and it is being set to zero in almost all IPv6 packets. The main Internet routing problem is that said routing is based on the shortest path algorithm, which leads to the possibility of some paths being congested while others are underused. To solve the congestion problem, many solutions aiming at traffic engineering support have been proposed, but this topic remains an open issue. This paper describes a new solution to support traffic engineering based on the usage of the IPv6 flow label for providing fast packet switching, which we have called PSA-TE6. In this document, we present the PSA-TE6 operation and evaluation regarding the label space reduction, label stacking cost and its minimization. The results show that PSA-TE6 is cheaper compared to the IP/MPLS solution when there is no label stacking, and that PSA-TE6 also outperforms IP/MPLS when the stacking is enabled until achieving a 40% presence of tunnels for encapsulation levels greater than 1.