Hi Brian,
>If it is defined architecturally as an immutable e2e value, there >are immediate ways to use it in hardware that will work for any >semantics we may later add to it. Could you give an example? From my understanding of the current draft, the information in the packet (the flow label, source address and destination address) will not be sufficient to uniquely identify a single flow. Without a knowledge of the flow lifetime (and protection of that lifetime across reboots, etc.) the same flow label may be used by multiple flows between a given source/destination pair, without any way for the routers to detect when one flow ends and another starts. Basically, a given flow label/source addr/dest addr combination can only be used to identify a group of flows between the source and destination. These flows may not have the same hop-by-hop options, may not be using the same upper layer protocols, etc. So, it wouldn't be reasonable for me to cache any information about the first flow, for fear that it would be used for the second (potentially very different) flow. As far as I can tell, this makes it impossible to use the flow label as current defined (without some out-of-band flow management system to supply knowledge of flow lifetimes) to identify a single flow. What am I missing? 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] --------------------------------------------------------------------
