Enhanced Augmented IP Routing Protocol (EAIRP) in IPv6 Environment

Data link level forwarding provides simple and fast packet forwarding capability. One primary reason for the simplicity of layer 2 forwarding comes from its short, fixed length labels. A node forwarding at network layer must parse a relatively large header, and perform a longest-prefix match to determine a forwarding path. When a node performs layer 2 forwarding it can do direct index lookup into its forwarding table with the short header. It is arguably simpler to build layer 2 forwarding hardware that it is to build layer 3 forwarding hardware because the layer 2 forwarding function is less complex. [2] By bypassing the conventional IP forwarding (the packet assembly/reassembly) process using cell-relaying, we could dramatically reduce both the IP packet processing delay and the queuing delay at the router. [5] Pushing traffic to layer 3 may cause congestion. If data is discarded or lost TCP will backoff.