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A multihomed host receives node configuration information from each of its provisioning domain. Some configuration objects are global to the node, some are local to the interface. Various issues arise when multiple conflicting node-scoped configuration objects are received on multiple interfaces. Similar situations also happen with single interface host connected to multiple networks. This document describes these issues.
This Internet-Draft is submitted in full conformance with the provisions of BCP 78 and BCP 79.
Internet-Drafts are working documents of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). Note that other groups may also distribute working documents as Internet-Drafts. The list of current Internet-Drafts is at http://datatracker.ietf.org/drafts/current/.
Internet-Drafts are draft documents valid for a maximum of six months and may be updated, replaced, or obsoleted by other documents at any time. It is inappropriate to use Internet-Drafts as reference material or to cite them other than as “work in progress.”
This Internet-Draft will expire on February 15, 2011.
Copyright (c) 2010 IETF Trust and the persons identified as the document authors. All rights reserved.
This document is subject to BCP 78 and the IETF Trust's Legal Provisions Relating to IETF Documents (http://trustee.ietf.org/license-info) in effect on the date of publication of this document. Please review these documents carefully, as they describe your rights and restrictions with respect to this document. Code Components extracted from this document must include Simplified BSD License text as described in Section 4.e of the Trust Legal Provisions and are provided without warranty as described in the Simplified BSD License.
1.
Introduction
2.
Terminology
3.
Scope and Existing Work
3.1.
Below IP Interaction
3.2.
Hosts Requirements
3.3.
Mobility and other IP protocols
3.4.
Address Selection
3.5.
Finding and Sharing IP Addresses with Peers
3.6.
Socket API and connection manager
4.
Symptoms
4.1.
DNS resolution issues
4.2.
Routing
4.3.
Address Selection Policy
4.4.
Single Interface on Multiple Provisioning Domains
5.
Problems
6.
Summary
7.
Security Considerations
8.
IANA Considerations
9.
Authors
10.
Acknowledgements
11.
Informative References
§
Authors' Addresses
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A multihomed host have multiple provisioning domains (via physical and/or virtual interfaces). For example, a node may be simultaneously connected to a wired Ethernet LAN, a 802.11 LAN, a 3G cell network, one or multiple VPN connections or one or multiple automatic or manual tunnels. Current laptops and smartphones typically have multiple access network interfaces and, thus, may be simultaneously connected to different provisioning domains.
A multihomed host receives node configuration information from each of its access networks, through various mechanisms such as DHCPv4 [RFC2131] (Droms, R., “Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol,” March 1997.), DHCPv6 [RFC3315] (Droms, R., Bound, J., Volz, B., Lemon, T., Perkins, C., and M. Carney, “Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol for IPv6 (DHCPv6),” July 2003.), PPP [RFC1661] (Simpson, W., “The Point-to-Point Protocol (PPP),” July 1994.) and IPv6 Router Advertisements [RFC4861] (Narten, T., Nordmark, E., Simpson, W., and H. Soliman, “Neighbor Discovery for IP version 6 (IPv6),” September 2007.). Some received configuration objects are specific to an interface such as the IP address and the link prefix. Others are typically considered by implementations as being global to the node, such as the routing information (e.g. default gateway), DNS servers IP addresses and address selection policies.
When the received node-scoped configuration objects have different values from each provisioning domains, such as different DNS servers IP addresses, different default gateways or different address selection policies, the node has to decide which it will use or how it will merge them.
Several issues regarding how the node-scoped configuration objects are used in a multihomed node environment have been raised. The following sections define the MIF host and the scope of this document, describe related work, list the symptoms and then the underlying problems.
A companion document [I‑D.ietf‑mif‑current‑practices] (Wasserman, M. and P. Seite, “Current Practices for Multiple Interface Hosts,” August 2010.) discusses current practices.
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Administrative domain
A group of hosts, routers, and networks operated and managed by a single organization [RFC1136] (Hares, S. and D. Katz, “Administrative Domains and Routing Domains: A model for routing in the Internet,” December 1989.).
Provisioning domain
A set of consistent configuration information (e.g. Default router, Network prefixes, DNS,...). One administrative domain can contain multiple provisioning domains.
A MIF (Multiple InterFaces) host has the following characteristics:
Reference to IP version
When a protocol keyword such as IP, PPP, DHCP is used without any reference to a specific IP version, then it implies both IPv4 and IPv6. A specific IP version keyword such as DHCPv4 or DHCPv6 is specific to that IP version.
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This section describes existing related work and defines the scope of the problem.
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Network discovery and selection on lower layers as defined by [RFC5113] (Arkko, J., Aboba, B., Korhonen, J., and F. Bari, “Network Discovery and Selection Problem,” January 2008.) is out of scope of this document. Moreover, lower layer interaction such as IEEE 802.21 is also out of scope.
Some mechanisms (e.g., based on a logical IP interface) allow sharing a single IP address across multiple interfaces (e.g., WiMAX and CDMA, LTE and HSPA, etc.) to disparate networks. From the IP stack view on the node, there is only a single interface and single IP address. Therefore, this situation is out of scope of this current problem statement. Furthermore, link aggregation done under IP where a single interface is shown to the IP stack is also out of scope.
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The requirements for Internet Hosts [RFC1122] (Braden, R., “Requirements for Internet Hosts - Communication Layers,” October 1989.) describe the multihomed host as if it has multiple IP addresses, which may be associated with one or more physical interfaces connected to the same or different networks.
The host maintains a route cache table where each entry contains the local IP address, the destination IP address, Type-of-Service and Next-hop gateway IP address. The route cache entry would have data about the properties of the path, such as the average round-trip delay measured by a transport protocol.
As per [RFC1122] (Braden, R., “Requirements for Internet Hosts - Communication Layers,” October 1989.), two models are defined:
The multihomed host computes routes for outgoing datagrams differently depending on the model. Under the strong model, the route is computed based on the source IP address, the destination IP address and the Type-of-Service. Under the weak model, the source IP address is not used, but only the destination IP address and the Type-of-Service.
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This document is only concerned with the situation where the hosts implement [RFC1122] (Braden, R., “Requirements for Internet Hosts - Communication Layers,” October 1989.) for IPv4 and [RFC4294] (Loughney, J., “IPv6 Node Requirements,” April 2006.) for IPv6 and not special-purpose support for transport layers, mobility, multi-homing, or identifier-locator split mechanisms. Dealing with multiple interfaces with such mechanisms is somewhat separate problem and under active study elsewhere in the IETF [RFC4960] (Stewart, R., “Stream Control Transmission Protocol,” September 2007.), [RFC5206] (Nikander, P., Henderson, T., Vogt, C., and J. Arkko, “End-Host Mobility and Multihoming with the Host Identity Protocol,” April 2008.), [RFC5533] (Nordmark, E. and M. Bagnulo, “Shim6: Level 3 Multihoming Shim Protocol for IPv6,” June 2009.), [RFC5648] (Wakikawa, R., Devarapalli, V., Tsirtsis, G., Ernst, T., and K. Nagami, “Multiple Care-of Addresses Registration,” October 2009.), [I‑D.ietf‑mptcp‑architecture] (Ford, A., Raiciu, C., Barre, S., and J. Iyengar, “Architectural Guidelines for Multipath TCP Development,” June 2010.).
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The Default Address Selection specification [RFC3484] (Draves, R., “Default Address Selection for Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6),” February 2003.) defines algorithms for source and destination IP address selections. It is mandatory to be implemented in IPv6 nodes, which also means dual-stack nodes. A node-scoped policy table managed by the IP stack is defined. Provisions are made to change or update the policy table, however, no mechanism is defined.
Issues on using the Default Address Selection were found in [RFC5220] (Matsumoto, A., Fujisaki, T., Hiromi, R., and K. Kanayama, “Problem Statement for Default Address Selection in Multi-Prefix Environments: Operational Issues of RFC 3484 Default Rules,” July 2008.) and [RFC5221] (Matsumoto, A., Fujisaki, T., Hiromi, R., and K. Kanayama, “Requirements for Address Selection Mechanisms,” July 2008.) in the context of multiple prefixes on the same link. New work [I‑D.ietf‑6man‑addr‑select‑sol] (Matsumoto, A., Fujisaki, T., and R. Hiromi, “Solution approaches for address-selection problems,” March 2010.) discusses the multiple attached networks scenarios and how to update the policy table.
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Interactive Connectivity Establishment (ICE (Rosenberg, J., “Interactive Connectivity Establishment (ICE): A Protocol for Network Address Translator (NAT) Traversal for Offer/Answer Protocols,” April 2010.) [RFC5245]) is a technique for NAT traversal for UDP-based (and TCP) media streams established by the offer/answer model. The multiplicity of IP addresses and ports in SDP offers are tested for connectivity by peer-to-peer connectivity checks. The result is candidate IP addresses and ports for establishing a connection with the other peer. However, ICE does not solve issues when incompatible configuration objects are received on different interfaces.
Some application protocols do referrals of IP addresses and port numbers for further exchanges. For instance, applications can provide reachability information to itself or to a third party. The general problem of referrals is related to the multiple interface problem, since, in this context, referrals must provide consistent information depending on which provisioning domain is used. The general referral problem has been studied in [I‑D.carpenter‑behave‑referral‑object] (Carpenter, B., Boucadair, M., Halpern, J., Jiang, S., and K. Moore, “A Generic Referral Object for Internet Entities,” October 2009.) and [I‑D.ietf‑shim6‑app‑refer] (Nordmark, E., “Shim6 Application Referral Issues,” July 2005.), but no solutions exist today.
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Application Programming Interface (API) may expose objects that user applications may use for dealing with multiple interfaces. For example, [RFC3542] (Stevens, W., Thomas, M., Nordmark, E., and T. Jinmei, “Advanced Sockets Application Program Interface (API) for IPv6,” May 2003.) shows how an application using the Advanced sockets API can specify the interface or the source IP address, through simple bind() operation or IPV6_PKTINFO socket option.
There are other examples of API dealing with similar issues to MIF. For instance, [RFC5014] (Nordmark, E., Chakrabarti, S., and J. Laganier, “IPv6 Socket API for Source Address Selection,” September 2007.) defines API to influence the default address selection mechanism by specifying attributes of the source addresses it prefers. [I‑D.ietf‑shim6‑multihome‑shim‑api] (Komu, M., Bagnulo, M., Slavov, K., and S. Sugimoto, “Socket Application Program Interface (API) for Multihoming Shim,” February 2010.) gives another example in a multihoming context, by defining a socket API enabling interactions between applications and the multihoming shim layer for advanced locator management, and access to information about failure detection and path exploration.
In the MIF context, some implementations, specially in the mobile world, rely on higher-level connection managers to deal with issues brought by multiple provisioning domains. Typically, the connection manager can select the provisioning domain when application is domain scoped. Connection managers usually leverage on API to gather information and/or for control purpose. However, there is no standardized high level API, and implementations differ also in the functionality that they provide. In addition, these mechanisms do not necessarily behave the same way across different platform and OS in the presence of the MIF problems [I‑D.ietf‑mif‑current‑practices] (Wasserman, M. and P. Seite, “Current Practices for Multiple Interface Hosts,” August 2010.). This lack of harmonization is an issue since it may lead to multiple instantiation of a cross platform/OS connection manager or application.
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This section describes the various symptoms found using a MIF host that has already received configuration objects from its various provisioning domains.
They occur, for example, when:
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A MIF host (H1) has an active interface(I1) connected to a network (N1) which has its DNS server (S1) and
another active interface (I2) connected to a network (N2) which has its DNS server (S2).
S1 serves with some private namespace "private.example.com". The user or the application
uses a name "a.private.example.com" which is within the private namespace of S1 and only resolvable by S1.
Any of the following situations may occur:
A MIF host may also be provisioned with a Interface-specific suffix search list ([I‑D.ietf‑mif‑current‑practices] (Wasserman, M. and P. Seite, “Current Practices for Multiple Interface Hosts,” August 2010.)). In this situation, if H1 sends DNS query on I1 using the search list tied to I2, the namespace could be not valid on I1 and the name could be not resolved.
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A MIF host (H1) has an active interface(I1) connected to a network (N1) and
another active interface (I2) connected to a network (N2). The user or the application
is trying to reach an IP address (IP1).
Any of the following situations may occur:
A MIF host may have multiple routes to a destination. However, by default, it does not have any hint concerning which interface would be the best to use for that destination. For example, a service provider might want to influence the routing table of the host connecting to its network.
A host usually has a node-scoped routing table. Therefore, when a MIF host is connected to multiple provisioning domains where each service provider wants to influence the routing table of the host, then conflicts might arise from the multiple routing information being pushed to the host.
A user on such multihomed host might want a local policy to influence which interface will be used based on various conditions.
On a MIF host, some source addresses are not valid if used on some interfaces. For example, an RFC1918 source address might be appropriate on the VPN interface but not on the public interface of the MIF host. If the source address is not chosen appropriately, then sent packets might be filtered in the path if source address filtering is in place ([RFC2827] (Ferguson, P. and D. Senie, “Network Ingress Filtering: Defeating Denial of Service Attacks which employ IP Source Address Spoofing,” May 2000.),[RFC3704] (Baker, F. and P. Savola, “Ingress Filtering for Multihomed Networks,” March 2004.)) and reply packets might never come back to the source.
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Even if not yet specified, the distribution of address selection policy is sometimes evoked. If deployed, such a mechanism could bring specific issue in a multiple provisioning domain context. Lets consider a MIF host(H1) with an active interface(I1) connected to a network (N1) and another active interface (I2) connected to a network (N2). When the user or the application is trying to reach an IP address (IP1), the following situations may occur:
H1 receives from both networks (N1 and N2) an update of its default address selection policy. However, the policies are specific to each network. The policies are merged by H1 stack. Based on the merged policy, the chosen source address is from N1 but packets are sent to N2. The source address is not reachable from N2, therefore the return packet is lost.
Merging address selection policies may have important impacts on routing.
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When a MIF host using a single interface is connected to multiple networks with different default routers, similar issues as described above happen. Even with a single interface, a node may wish to connect to more than one configuration domain: that node may use more than one IP source address and may have more than one default router. The node may want to access services that can only be reached using one of the provisioning domain, so it needs to use the right outgoing source address and default gateway to reach that service. In this situation, that node may also need to use different DNS servers to get domain names in those different provisioning domains.
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This section lists the underlying problems leading to the issues discussed in the previous section. The problems can be divided into five
categories: 1) Configuration 2) DNS resolution 3) Routing 4) Address selection and 5) connection management and API. They are shown as below:
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A MIF host receives node configuration information from each of its provisioning domains. Some configuration objects are global to the node, some are local to the interface. Various issues arise when multiple conflicting node-scoped configuration objects are received via multiple provisioning domains. Similar situations also happen with single interface host connected to multiple networks. Therefore, there is a need to define the appropriate behavior of an IP stack and possibly define protocols to manage these cases.
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The problems discussed in this document have security implications, such as when the packets sent on the wrong interface might be leaking some confidential information. Moreover, the undetermined behavior of IP stacks in the multihomed context bring additional threats where an interface on a multihomed host might be used to conduct attacks targeted to the networks connected by the other interfaces.
Additional security concerns raise up when information is provided to the host so that it could make a more intelligent decision (e.g. provide selection policies to the connection manager). This additional information should be protected in some manner.
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This document has no actions for IANA.
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This document is a joint effort with authors of the MIF requirements draft [I‑D.yang‑mif‑req] (Yang, P., Seite, P., Williams, C., and J. Qin, “Requirements on multiple Interface (MIF) of simple IP,” March 2009.). The authors of this document, in alphabetical order, include: Marc Blanchet, Jacqni Qin, Pierrick Seite, Carl Williams and Peny Yang.
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The initial Internet-Drafts prior to the MIF working group and the discussions during the MIF BOF meeting and on the mailing list around the MIF charter scope on the mailing list brought very good input to the problem statement. This draft steals a lot of text from these discussions and initial drafts (e.g. [I‑D.yang‑mif‑req] (Yang, P., Seite, P., Williams, C., and J. Qin, “Requirements on multiple Interface (MIF) of simple IP,” March 2009.), [I‑D.hui‑ip‑multiple‑connections‑ps] (Hui, M. and H. Deng, “Problem Statement and Requirement of Simple IP Multi-homing of the Host,” March 2009.), [I‑D.savolainen‑mif‑dns‑server‑selection] (Savolainen, T., “Improved DNS Server Selection for Multi-Homed Hosts,” June 2010.)). Therefore, the editor would like to acknowledge the following people (in no specific order), from which some text has been taken from: Jari Arkko, Keith Moore, Sam Hartman, George Tsirtsis, Scott Brim, Ted Lemon, Bernie Volz, Giyeong Son, Gabriel Montenegro, Julien Laganier, Teemu Savolainen, Christian Vogt, Lars Eggert, Margaret Wasserman, Hui Deng, Ralph Droms, Ted Hardie, Christian Huitema, Rémi Denis-Courmont, Alexandru Petrescu, Zhen Cao. Sorry if some contributors have not been named.
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[I-D.carpenter-behave-referral-object] | Carpenter, B., Boucadair, M., Halpern, J., Jiang, S., and K. Moore, “A Generic Referral Object for Internet Entities,” draft-carpenter-behave-referral-object-01 (work in progress), October 2009 (TXT). |
[I-D.hui-ip-multiple-connections-ps] | Hui, M. and H. Deng, “Problem Statement and Requirement of Simple IP Multi-homing of the Host,” draft-hui-ip-multiple-connections-ps-02 (work in progress), March 2009 (TXT). |
[I-D.ietf-6man-addr-select-sol] | Matsumoto, A., Fujisaki, T., and R. Hiromi, “Solution approaches for address-selection problems,” draft-ietf-6man-addr-select-sol-03 (work in progress), March 2010 (TXT). |
[I-D.ietf-behave-dns64] | Bagnulo, M., Sullivan, A., Matthews, P., and I. Beijnum, “DNS64: DNS extensions for Network Address Translation from IPv6 Clients to IPv4 Servers,” draft-ietf-behave-dns64-10 (work in progress), July 2010 (TXT). |
[I-D.ietf-mif-current-practices] | Wasserman, M. and P. Seite, “Current Practices for Multiple Interface Hosts,” draft-ietf-mif-current-practices-03 (work in progress), August 2010 (TXT). |
[I-D.ietf-mptcp-architecture] | Ford, A., Raiciu, C., Barre, S., and J. Iyengar, “Architectural Guidelines for Multipath TCP Development,” draft-ietf-mptcp-architecture-01 (work in progress), June 2010 (TXT). |
[I-D.ietf-shim6-app-refer] | Nordmark, E., “Shim6 Application Referral Issues,” draft-ietf-shim6-app-refer-00 (work in progress), July 2005 (TXT). |
[I-D.ietf-shim6-multihome-shim-api] | Komu, M., Bagnulo, M., Slavov, K., and S. Sugimoto, “Socket Application Program Interface (API) for Multihoming Shim,” draft-ietf-shim6-multihome-shim-api-13 (work in progress), February 2010 (TXT). |
[I-D.savolainen-mif-dns-server-selection] | Savolainen, T., “Improved DNS Server Selection for Multi-Homed Hosts,” draft-savolainen-mif-dns-server-selection-03 (work in progress), June 2010 (TXT). |
[I-D.yang-mif-req] | Yang, P., Seite, P., Williams, C., and J. Qin, “Requirements on multiple Interface (MIF) of simple IP,” draft-yang-mif-req-00 (work in progress), March 2009 (TXT). |
[RFC1122] | Braden, R., “Requirements for Internet Hosts - Communication Layers,” STD 3, RFC 1122, October 1989 (TXT). |
[RFC1136] | Hares, S. and D. Katz, “Administrative Domains and Routing Domains: A model for routing in the Internet,” RFC 1136, December 1989 (TXT). |
[RFC1661] | Simpson, W., “The Point-to-Point Protocol (PPP),” STD 51, RFC 1661, July 1994 (TXT). |
[RFC1918] | Rekhter, Y., Moskowitz, R., Karrenberg, D., Groot, G., and E. Lear, “Address Allocation for Private Internets,” BCP 5, RFC 1918, February 1996 (TXT). |
[RFC2131] | Droms, R., “Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol,” RFC 2131, March 1997 (TXT, HTML, XML). |
[RFC2827] | Ferguson, P. and D. Senie, “Network Ingress Filtering: Defeating Denial of Service Attacks which employ IP Source Address Spoofing,” BCP 38, RFC 2827, May 2000 (TXT). |
[RFC3315] | Droms, R., Bound, J., Volz, B., Lemon, T., Perkins, C., and M. Carney, “Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol for IPv6 (DHCPv6),” RFC 3315, July 2003 (TXT). |
[RFC3484] | Draves, R., “Default Address Selection for Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6),” RFC 3484, February 2003 (TXT). |
[RFC3542] | Stevens, W., Thomas, M., Nordmark, E., and T. Jinmei, “Advanced Sockets Application Program Interface (API) for IPv6,” RFC 3542, May 2003 (TXT). |
[RFC3704] | Baker, F. and P. Savola, “Ingress Filtering for Multihomed Networks,” BCP 84, RFC 3704, March 2004 (TXT). |
[RFC4294] | Loughney, J., “IPv6 Node Requirements,” RFC 4294, April 2006 (TXT). |
[RFC4477] | Chown, T., Venaas, S., and C. Strauf, “Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP): IPv4 and IPv6 Dual-Stack Issues,” RFC 4477, May 2006 (TXT). |
[RFC4861] | Narten, T., Nordmark, E., Simpson, W., and H. Soliman, “Neighbor Discovery for IP version 6 (IPv6),” RFC 4861, September 2007 (TXT). |
[RFC4960] | Stewart, R., “Stream Control Transmission Protocol,” RFC 4960, September 2007 (TXT). |
[RFC5014] | Nordmark, E., Chakrabarti, S., and J. Laganier, “IPv6 Socket API for Source Address Selection,” RFC 5014, September 2007 (TXT). |
[RFC5113] | Arkko, J., Aboba, B., Korhonen, J., and F. Bari, “Network Discovery and Selection Problem,” RFC 5113, January 2008 (TXT). |
[RFC5206] | Nikander, P., Henderson, T., Vogt, C., and J. Arkko, “End-Host Mobility and Multihoming with the Host Identity Protocol,” RFC 5206, April 2008 (TXT). |
[RFC5220] | Matsumoto, A., Fujisaki, T., Hiromi, R., and K. Kanayama, “Problem Statement for Default Address Selection in Multi-Prefix Environments: Operational Issues of RFC 3484 Default Rules,” RFC 5220, July 2008 (TXT). |
[RFC5221] | Matsumoto, A., Fujisaki, T., Hiromi, R., and K. Kanayama, “Requirements for Address Selection Mechanisms,” RFC 5221, July 2008 (TXT). |
[RFC5245] | Rosenberg, J., “Interactive Connectivity Establishment (ICE): A Protocol for Network Address Translator (NAT) Traversal for Offer/Answer Protocols,” RFC 5245, April 2010 (TXT). |
[RFC5533] | Nordmark, E. and M. Bagnulo, “Shim6: Level 3 Multihoming Shim Protocol for IPv6,” RFC 5533, June 2009 (TXT). |
[RFC5648] | Wakikawa, R., Devarapalli, V., Tsirtsis, G., Ernst, T., and K. Nagami, “Multiple Care-of Addresses Registration,” RFC 5648, October 2009 (TXT). |
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Marc Blanchet | |
Viagenie | |
2600 boul. Laurier, suite 625 | |
Quebec, QC G1V 4W1 | |
Canada | |
Email: | Marc.Blanchet@viagenie.ca |
URI: | http://www.viagenie.ca |
Pierrick Seite | |
France Telecom - Orange | |
4, rue du Clos Courtel, BP 91226 | |
Cesson-Sevigne 35512 | |
France | |
Email: | pierrick.seite@orange-ftgroup.com |