USENIX 2001 Paper   
[USENIX '01 Tech Program Index]
Pp. 319332 of the Proceedings | |
Next:Introduction
A Waypoint Service Approach to Connect
Heterogeneous Internet Address Spaces
T. S. Eugene Ng, Ion Stoica, Hui Zhang
Carnegie Mellon University
Pittsburgh, PA 15213
{eugeneng, istoica, hzhang}@cs.cmu.edu
Abstract:
The rapid growth of the Internet has made IP addresses a scarce resource.
To get around this problem, today and in the foreseeable future, networks
will be deployed with reusable-IP addresses (a.k.a. private-IP addresses)
or IPv6 addresses. The Internet is therefore evolving into a collection
of networks of heterogeneous address spaces. Such development jeopardizes
the fundamental bi-directional connectivity property of the Internet.
The problem is that, without IP addresses, non-IP hosts (i.e. reusable-IP
or IPv6 hosts) cannot be directly addressed by IP hosts, making it impossible
for IP hosts to initiate connections to them. To solve this problem, we
propose a network layer waypoint (3rd-party network agent) service called
AVES. The key idea is to virtualize non-IP hosts by a set of IP
addresses assigned to waypoints. The waypoints then act as relays to connect
IP hosts to non-IP hosts. This scheme allows every IP host to simultaneously
connect to as many non-IP hosts as the number of waypoint IP addresses.
Therefore high connectivity is achieved by AVES even when a small number
of IP addresses are used. Unlike other known solutions, AVES can provide
general connectivity and does not require any change to existing IP hosts
or IP network routers for easy deployment. We have implemented and deployed
an AVES prototype system at CMU. A wide range of applications have been
shown to work seamlessly with AVES. Details of our implementation's design,
performance and limitations are discussed.
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