RFC 1674 (rfc1674) - Page 2 of 3
A Cellular Industry View of IPng
Alternative Format: Original Text Document
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