A Review of IPv6 Multihoming Solutions

Multihoming is simply defined as having connection to the Internet through more than one Internet service provider. Multihoming is a desired functionality with a growing demand because it provides fault tolerance and guarantees a continuous service for users. In the current Internet, which employs IPv4 as the network layer protocol, this functionality is achieved by announcing multihomed node prefixes through its all providers. But this solution, which employs Border Gateway Protocol, is not able to scale properly and adapt to the rapid growth of the Internet. IPv6 offers a larger address space compared to IPv4. Considering rapid growth of the Internet and demand for multihoming, the scalability issues of the current solution will turn into a disaster in the future Internet with IPv6 as the network layer protocol. A wide range of solutions have been proposed for multihoming in IPv6. In this paper, we briefly review active solutions in this area and perform an analysis, from deployability viewpoint, on them.