RFC 1674 (rfc1674) - Page 2 of 3

A Cellular Industry View of IPng

RFC 1674            A Cellular Industry View of IPng         August 1994


   deployment wireless technology amplifies the requirement for
   topological flexibility.

   As a by-product of mobility, the significance of "occasionally-
   connected hosts" increases.  The ability to accommodate
   occasionally-connected hosts in IPng is a requirement.

Scale

   In terms of scale, we envision some 20 to 40 million users by the
   year 2007.  In this context a "user" can be anything from a vending
   machine to a "road warrior".  These numbers are for North America
   alone.  Worldwide, we anticipate that IPng should be able to support
   billions of "users".  Of course, the sparseness of network address
   assignments which is necessary for subnetting, etc., dictates that
   IPng should support at least tens or hundreds of billions of
   addresses.

Addressing

   In terms of addressing, we would expect addresses to be hierarchical.
   In addition, a node with multiple links should require only a single
   address although more than one address should also be possible.  The
   mapping of names to addresses should be independent of location; an
   address should be an address, not a route.  Variable-length
   addressing is also required to ensure continued protocol (IPng)
   extensibility.  Administration of address assignments should be
   distributed and not centralized as it is now.

Security

   IPng should also support security mechanisms which will grow
   increasingly important on the proverbial "information highway" for
   commercial users.  Security services which may optionally be expected
   from a Layer 3 entity such as IPng include peer entity
   authentication, data confidentiality, traffic flow confidentiality,
   data integrity and location confidentiality.

Accounting

   The ability to do accounting at Layer 3 is a requirement.  The CDPD
   specification can be used as a model of the type of accounting
   services that we need.








Taylor