State of Host-Centric Multihoming in IP Networks

In this paper, we review the currently proposed, and most potential, host-centric multihoming solutions by the Internet Engineering Task Force. The concerns, related to the scalability and performance of the global routing system in current and in the IPv6 Internet, resulted in the selection of host-centric approaches to multihoming. It strengthens the end-to-end nature of the Internet, which proved to be so important and beneficial, by pushing more logic to the edge of the network. At the same time, this approach opens some new challenges for end hosts and also new possibilities. Core challenges include fault tolerance and transport layer survivability in the face of network failures, renumbering or host mobility; while new possibilities arise in host-centric traffic engineering. We describe how current solutions tackle these challenges.