Subject: MASC and IPv6 IDs

From: Pavlin Ivanov Radoslavov <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 19 Oct 1999 21:50:38 -0700

Currently, MASC uses variable length fields for Mcast Prefix Address
and Prefix Mask for each claim. The length is defined by the Address
Family field in each claim: 4 octets for IPv4, and 6 octets for IPv6;
however, the Domain and the Node IDs (in both the OPEN and UPDATE
messages) have fixed length: 32 bits each.

The Origin Domain ID and Origin Node ID need to be unique among all
siblings, parents, and children of a given MASC domain. To avoid
problems that may come by selecting "locally unique IDs", it is
better if those IDs are globally unique, but obviously this is not
possible with IPv6 and Node ID of only 32 bits.

I would suggest to make both Node ID and Domain ID variable
length (defined by AddrFamily): 32 bits for IPv4 and 128 bits for
IPv6. Strictly speaking, we don't need 128 bits for Domain ID, but
it will be less confusing if both Node ID and Domain ID are same
length, and anyway MASC is very slow and low BW protocol, so the
overhead will be negligible.

Comments?

Thanks,
Pavlin

P.S. BTW, I don't have strong opinion if/when/why we may need to use
MASC for IPv6, but it seems easy to do support it, and won't hurt
anyway ;)