A Waypoint Service Approach to Connect Heterogeneous Internet Address Spaces

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 collectionof 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 ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2001
• Where: USENIX
• Authors: T. S. Eugene Ng, Ion Stoica, Hui Zhang
• Keywords: IP Addresses, Ip Hosts, Non-IP Hosts, Operating System, USENIX 2001