Subject: Address Allocation with IPV6

From: MEDDOUR Djamal Eddine thesard FTRD/DAC/LAN <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 12 Feb 2002 09:41:13 +0100

hi all
I am reading a paper which talk about Address Allocation with IPV6 (IPv6
Autoconfiguration in Large Scale Mobile Ad Hoc Networks). do you think
really that a same scheme is needed?. in IPV6 we have a huge number of IP
address, we can attribute statically one adresse by node (when we buy a
terminal we can buy an IP address with it).
any comments ?

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From: Kilian Weniger <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 12 Feb 2002 11:26:45 +0100 (CET)

Hello Djamal,

I have two comments on that:

Firstly, in your scenario routing would only work if every existing
device has an unique IPv6 address assigned by the manufacturer.
This is not the case today and even
if EVERY manufacturer would start doing so at some point of time in the
future (I don't see any such effort, yet), there are still
thousands of devices without addresses, that were sold before.
Furthermore, you would need some sort of central registration, as there is
for IEEE MAC-addresses. And even the MAC-addresses are not unique today
(some manufacturers sell devices with unregistered MAC-addresses; you can change
the MAC-address of some devices,...). So even in the case you would have
this central registry, you probably want to have a backup solution to
guarantee unique addresses.

By the way, if you argue against IPv6 SAA in ad hoc networks, you
could also argue against IPv6 SAA in general (in wired LANs). You
wouldn't need that, too, if all (wired) network devices would have unique,
pre-assigned IPv6 addresses.

Secondly, a hierarchy is established by the architecture described in the
paper, which can be used by routing protocols to achieve an improved
scalability (route aggregation...). You wouldn't have this with
preassigned addresses.

Kilian Weniger

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