Combining SPF and source routing for an efficient probing solution in IPv6 topology discovery

Source routing and routing protocols are two well known methods used to discover network connectivity within IPv6 networks. The source routing discovery method faces the challenge of probing space explosion phenomenon which generates a large volume of traffic and takes a significant amount of time to discover the entire network. On the other hand, a routing protocol based approach, such as OSPFv3, discovers the network connectivity but only discovers the prefix portion of the IPv6 addresses. To address these issues, this paper proposes an efficient probing space reduction algorithm by combining source routing and OSPFv3 for the purpose of network discovery. The idea is to apply source routing based on the information obtained from the OSPFv3 based discovery for IPv6. Preliminary experimental results show that the proposed algorithm reduces redundant probing for source routing significantly, which is useful for network management.