Deployment of service aware access networks through IPv6

Substantial research effort is currently devoted to the development of a future, low-cost access and edge network, enabling the delivery of broadband multimedia services to subscribers. As the world is moving away from current ATM (Asynchronous Transfer Mode) and PPP (Point-to-Point Protocol) access network architectures for a number of reasons, including lack of Quality of service (QoS) and autoconfiguration support, this paper presents how IPv6 can fill the hole that ATM and PPP leave behind in a very convenient, packet-oriented way. The described architecture allows multiple edge nodes to be present, increasing robustness in case of edge node failure, but also increasing scalability as non-local traffic can be balanced across multiple edge nodes. The ability to process local traffic without edge involvement further increases scalability, due to the growing peer-to-peer traffic volume. Since the architecture is independent of the underlying layer-2 technology used for the aggregation network, a phased and smooth migration from ATM to Ethernet equipment, which is claimed cheaper and easier to maintain, is possible. For some selected broadband access topologies, an efficient IPv6 subnetting scheme, minimizing routing tables through hierarchical addressing, is introduced and evaluated. Solutions for forcing non-local traffic to the correct ISP edge, in a multi-ISP environment, are presented. Finally, the deployment of the described architecture in an actual IPv6 test bed is discussed.