Internet-draft Intra-site Automatic Tunnel Addressing Protocol (isatap) (formerly: Connecting Ipv6 Nodes within Ipv4 Sites)

This document specifies a method for connecting IPv6 hosts and routers (nodes) within predominantly IPv4-based sites. This method is based on an IPv6-IPv4 compatibility aggregatable global unicast address format (described herein) that embeds the IPv4 address of a node within the EUI-64 format interface identifier of an IPv6 address. This document assumes that, during the IPv4 to IPv6 coexistence and transition phase, many sites will deploy IPv6 incrementally within their IPv4 interior routing domains; especially those sites which have large and complex pre-existing IPv4 infrastructures. Within such sites, the address format and methods described in this document will enable IPv6 deployment for nodes that do not share a common multiple access datalink with an IPv6 gateway within their site. While other works in progress in the NGTRANS working group propose mechanisms for assigning globally-unique IPv6 address prefixes to sites and methods for inter-domain routing between such sites, the approach outlined in this memo enables large-scale incremental deployment of IPv6 for nodes within a site’s pre-existing IPv4 infrastructure without incurring aggregation scaling issues at the border gateways nor requiring site-wide deployment of special IPv4 services such as multicast. The approach proposed by this document supports IPv6 routing within both the site-local and global IPv6 routing domains as well as automatic IPv6 in IPv4 tunneling across portions of a site’s IPv4 infrastructure which have no native IPv6 support. Moreover, this approach supports automatic tunneling within sites which use non globally-unique IPv4 address assignments, such as when Network Address Translation [NAT] is used. Status of this Memo This document is an Internet-Draft and is in full conformance with all provisions of Section 10 of RFC2026. Templin Expires 12 October 2001 [Page 1] INTERNET-DRAFT Intra-Site Automatic Tunnel Addressing 12 March 2001 Internet-Drafts are working documents of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), its areas, and its working groups. Note that other groups may also distribute working documents as InternetDrafts. 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 InternetDrafts as reference material or to cite them other than as "work in progress." The list of current Internet-Drafts can be accessed at http://www.ietf.org/ietf/1id-abstracts.txt The list of Internet-Draft Shadow Directories can be accessed at http://www.ietf.org/shadow.html.