TCP/IP Illustrated Episode 27

Fragment Header

The Fragment header is used by an IPv6 source when sending a datagram larger than the path MTU of the datagram’s intended destination. Path MTU and how it is determined are discussed in more detail in Chapter 13, but 1280 bytes is a network-wide link-layer minimum MTU for IPv6 (see section 5 of [RFC2460]). In IPv4, any host or router can fragment a datagram if it is too large for the MTU on the next hop, and fields within the second 32-bit word of the IPv4 header indicate the fragmentation information. In IPv6, only the sender of the datagram is permitted to perform fragmentation, and in such cases a Fragment header is added.

IP Forwarding

Conceptually, IP forwarding is simple, especially for a host. If the destination is directly connected to the host (e.g., a point-to-point link) or on a shared network (e.g., Ethernet), the IP datagram is sent directly to the destination—a router is not required or used. Otherwise, the host sends the datagram to a single router (called the default router) and lets the router deliver the datagram to its destination. This simple scheme handles most host configurations.

In this section we investigate the details of this simple situation and also how IP forwarding works when the situation is not as simple. We begin by noting that most hosts today can be configured to be routers as well as hosts, and many home networks use an Internet-connected PC to act as a router (and also a firewall, as we discuss in Chapter 7). What differentiates a host from a router to IP is how IP datagrams are handled: a host never forwards datagrams it does not originate, whereas routers do.

Forwarding Table

The IP protocol standards do not dictate the precise data required to be in a forwarding table, as this choice is left up to the implementer of the IP protocol. Nevertheless, several key pieces of information are generally required to implement the forwarding table for IP, and we shall discuss these now. Each entry in the routing or forwarding table contains the following information fields, at least conceptually:

• Destination: This contains a 32-bit field (or 128-bit field for IPv6) used for matching the result of a masking operation (see the next bulleted item). The destination can be as simple as zero, for a “default route” covering all destinations, or as long as the full length of an IP address, in the case of a “host route” that describes only a single destination.
• Mask: This contains a 32-bit field (128-bit field for IPv6) applied as a bitwise AND mask to the destination IP address of a datagram being looked up in the forwarding table. The masked result is compared with the set of destinations in the forwarding table entries.
• Next-hop: This contains the 32-bit IPv4 address or 128-bit IPv6 address of the next IP entity (router or host) to which the datagram should be sent. The next-hop entity is typically on a network shared with the system performing the forwarding lookup, meaning the two share the same network prefix (see Chapter 2).
• Interface: This contains an identifier used by the IP layer to reference the network interface that should be used to send the datagram to its next hop. For example, it could refer to a host’s 802.11 wireless interface, a wired Ethernet interface, or a PPP interface associated with a serial port. If the forwarding system is also the sender of the IP datagram, this field is used in selecting which source IP address to use on the outgoing datagram (see Section 5.6.2.1).

IP Forwarding Actions

When the IP layer in a host or router needs to send an IP datagram to a next-hop router or host, it first examines the destination IP address (D) in the datagram. Using the value D, the following longest prefix match algorithm is executed on the forwarding table:

1.Search the table for all entries for which the following property holds: (D ^ mj) = dj, where mj is the value of the mask field associated with the forwarding entry ej having index j, and dj is the value of the destination field associated with ej. This means that the destination IP address D is bitwise ANDed with the mask in each forwarding table entry (mj), and the result is compared against the destination in the same forwarding table entry (dj). If the property holds, the entry (ej here) is a “match” for the destination IP address. When a match happens, the algorithm notes the entry index (j here) and how many bits in the mask mj were set to 1. The more bits set to 1, the “better” the match.
2.The best matching entry ek (i.e., the one with the largest number of 1 bits in its mask mk) is selected, and its next-hop field nk is used as the next-hop IP address in forwarding the datagram.

Examples

To get a solid understanding of how IP forwarding works both in the simple local environment (e.g., same LAN) and in the somewhat more complicated multihop (global Internet) environment, we look at two cases. The first case, where all systems are using the same network prefix, is called direct delivery, and the other case is called indirect delivery (see Figure 5-16).

Direct Delivery

First consider a simple example. Our Windows XP host (with IPv4 address S and MAC address S), which we will just call S, has an IP datagram to send to our Linux host (IPv4 address D, MAC address D), which we will call D. These systems are interconnected using a switch. Both hosts are on the same Ethernet (see inside front cover). Figure 5-16 (top) shows the delivery of the datagram. When the IP layer in S receives a datagram to send from one of the upper layers such as TCP or UDP, it searches its forwarding table. We would expect the forwarding table on S to contain the information shown in Table 5-8.

Indirect Delivery

Now consider another example. Our Windows host has an IP datagram to send to the host ftp.uu.net, whose IPv4 address is 192.48.96.9. Figure 5-16 (bottom) shows the conceptual path of the datagram through four routers. First, the Windows machine searches its forwarding table but does not find a matching prefix on the local network. It uses its default route entry (which matches every destination, but with no 1 bits at all). The default entry indicates that the appropriate nexthop gateway is 10.0.0.1 (the “a side” of the router R1). This is a typical scenario for a home network.