Making applications aware of IPv6 multi-prefix networking

Abstract

The IPv6 protocol provides, besides its 128-bit locator, a lot of interesting new networking principles to the Internet. One very promising concept is called Provisioning Domains (PvD). It allows to regroup different networking configuration elements together.

The goal of this paper is to make applications aware of PvD principles in order to show its usefulness throughout different use cases. Two open-source projects, the VideoLan VLC media player as well as the GNOME Web browser, have been successfully extended with features, which allow the user to interact with PvDs in different ways. But, in order to modify these applications, the appropriate tools and development infrastructure are needed. Most of the tools are already provided through previous works, but the collection has been expanded by a new tool allowing the collection of network statistics in function of Provisioning Domains. A new development environment had to be created as well, to effectively probe the new developed features.

But, in order to understand the functioning of those features, a good understanding of IPv6 and PvD principles is needed. Thus, this document starts off by giving a general description of some of their concepts.