An Evolvable Locator/ID Separation Internet Architecture (ELISIA)

Abstract

In the current Internet, IP address system suffers from the overloading of semantics. This brings great challenge to the scalability of the routing system and the mobility of network hosts. One proposal called Locator/ID separation which separates network layer into locater layer and ID layer has been discussed within the IETF and IRTF for years. In the meantime, the Internet is going through a phase of transition from IPv4 to IPv6. One seamless approach called IVI which achieves IPv4/IPv6 inter-connection by stateless address and protocol translation is designed and has been fully tested. However, most of the existing Locator/ID separation approaches do not take IPv4/IPv6 transition into consideration and have scalability problem. In this paper, we propose an evolvable Locator/ID separation Internet architecture (ELISIA), which extends the address mapping mechanism of IVI system and NAT system as its Locator/ID mapping mechanism. In this new architecture, hosts mobility and multihoming are supported, the growth rate of routing table will slow down, both IPv4 and IPv6 applications can get access to Internet without upgrading backbone into dual stack. What's more important, we expect that through the deployment of this architecture, the current Internet would eventually evolve into pure IPv6 network while IPv4 quits from history stage.