I have a few comments/questions on the general flow label topic. They are not specific to draft-rajahalame-ipv6-flow-label-00.txt, but they do apply to this proposal, as well as others.
I've hesitated to raise this issue for fear of being publicly stoned, but... It seems to me that an IPv6-specific location within the IPv6 header may not be the right place for a flow label. I am not an expert in label switching technologies, but the ones that I do know (VLAN, MPLS) put the label after the link layer header and before the IP header (conceptually at layer 2-1/2). This allows the flow label to be located, and used for switching, without the need to process the layer 3 header at all. This allows the same label switching technology to work in current IPv4 and mixed-protocol networks. Since we may not have large IPv6-only networks for some time, a flow label within the IPv6 header seems, to me, fundamentally less useful than a flow label that can be appended before any layer 3 header (IPv4, IPv6, ??). Are there reasons for preferring to put a flow label inside the IPv6 header? Is this being done on the advice of folks who are standardizing label switching technologies? Margaret -------------------------------------------------------------------- IETF IPng Working Group Mailing List IPng Home Page: http://playground.sun.com/ipng FTP archive: ftp://playground.sun.com/pub/ipng Direct all administrative requests to [EMAIL PROTECTED] --------------------------------------------------------------------
