The basic procedures of hierarchical automatic locator number allocation protocol HANA

In order to suppress the increase in the global routing table size, address hierarchicalization and multihoming that does not depend on routing mechanisms are required. This type of multihoming can be achieved by a method that allows an end site to be allocated multiple address spaces from upstream ISPs and utilize all of them. We call this type of multihoming end-to-end (E2E) multihoming. In E2E multihoming, when a site adds or changes an upstream ISP, the addresses are also added or changed. If a network manager must handle these changes manually, these changes become too cumbersome a task for him or her. Thus, in order to deploy E2E multihoming, a hierarchical automatic renumbering protocol is required. We propose a Hierarchical Automatic locator Number Allocation (HANA) protocol, which considers hierarchical end-to-end multihoming, and reduces the manual router settings. In the HANA protocol, the lower part of an addresses (midfixes) are automatically allocated in each domain, and the upper part of an addresses (prefixes) are distributed from the upper-level ISPs in multiple layers, in the manner as the previously-allocated midfixes are combined. In addition, we discuss the implementation and evaluation of the HANA protocol, and show that it is manageable in real networks.