Leveraging network performance with IPv6 multihoming and multiple provider-dependent aggregatable prefixes

Multihoming, the practice of connecting to multiple providers, is becoming highly popular. Due to the growth of the BGP routing tables in the Internet, IPv6 multihoming is required to preserve the scalability of the interdomain routing system. A proposed method is to assign multiple provider-dependent aggregatable (PA) IPv6 prefixes to each site, instead of a single provider-independent (PI) prefix. We show that the use of multiple PA prefixes not only allows route aggregation but also can be used to reduce end-to-end delays by leveraging the Internet path diversity. We quantify the gain in path diversity, and show that a dual-homed stub AS that uses multiple PA prefixes has already a better Internet path diversity than any multihomed stub AS that uses a single PI prefix, whatever its number of providers. The benefits provided by the use of IPv6 multihoming with multiple PA prefixes are an opportunity to develop the support for quality of service and traffic engineering.