Supporting future internet services with extensible in-band processing (EIP)

ABSTRACTNetworking architectures need to evolve to support the requirements of future Internet services and 6G networks. In this paper we propose an evolutionary solution that extends the IPv6 networking architecture fully supporting the needs of future services, called Extensible In-band Processing (EIP). The EIP solution considers a feature-rich networking layer, in which hosts and routers can cooperate by reading and writing the EIP information in the IPv6 packet headers, to support a number of use cases. Example use case are: advanced monitoring, semantic routing, deterministic networking, slicing and so on. This list of use cases is not exhaustive, as a key feature of EIP is to be extensible for the support of new use cases. In the paper we describe the initial design of the EIP header and protocol mechanisms. We have released an open source prototype implementation of EIP for Linux OS, based on the eBPF packet processing framework. The implementation includes tools for the generation of test EIP packets and for the protocol dissection of packets. A replicable testbed provides an early demonstration of the advanced monitoring and semantic routing use cases.