IPv6 Routing in a Special Context

This chapter gives an overview of the IPv6 routing techniques focusing on some special IPv6 routing mechanisms, which can ease and optimize IP level data aggregation. Data aggregation should become an important step in information collecting from sensors or other data sources in present-day, IP based networks. In general, a simple feedback message only costs a few bit, or bytes; therefore, using a whole IP packet for every one of them is rather wasteful according to the present resources. Our objective is to introduce a special IPv6 routing method called IPv6 anycasting, which makes possible to identify various services with an IPv6 network address. Basically, by the standard, anycasting is not able to maintain stateful communication sessions, but feedback data aggregation does not require stateful operation, therefore anycasting is an ideal solution to provide feedback routing. The chapter will concentrate on IPv6 advanced routing schemes, and introduce a new IPv6 anycast based system-level data aggregation mechanism.