AVES Connectivity and Deployability

In Section 3.2, we described two data path designs. Assuming $N$ IP addresses are assigned to waypoints, the in-bound connectivity achieved by each design is as follows. For the regular data path design without support for multi-homing:

• All hosts in non-IP networks are simultaneously reachable directly by IP hosts, regardless of the size of $N$.

• Each IP host can simultaneously open $N$ sessions to reach a maximum of $N$ non-IP hosts.

With multi-homing support, since port or identifier numbers are used for connection demultiplexing, the following additional restriction is imposed:

• Each port number of each non-IP host can be reached by no more than 65,000 TCP and 65,000 UDP connections simultaneously through each AVES-aware NAT gateway. Also, through each AVES-aware NAT gateway, each non-IP host can be reached by no more than 65,000 ICMP connections simultaneously. If a protocol does not use port or identifier number, then each non-IP host can only be reached by one connection of such protocol through each AVES-aware NAT gateway at a time.

Thus, as long as $N$ is greater than the average number of simultaneous sessions to non-IP hosts opened by a typical IP initiator, say $N = 50$, in-bound connectivity can be restored to a high level.

To summarize AVES's deployability, waypoints can be independently deployed; NAT gateways need to be extended, however this is necessary and acceptable because their operators have the right incentives to perform the upgrade. To deploy AVES for an intranet, upgrading the local DNS server software will provide the best performance. However, even when it is impossible to upgrade existing DNS servers, the delayed binding technique can be used at the expense of lowered performance. In all cases, no existing IP hosts or IP network routers need to be modified.