SRv6-based Route Shortening for Optimizing Communication Resources in Multi-homed Environments

Optimizing communication resource usage and reducing latency are crucial issues in multi-homed environments where routers are connected to multiple Internet Service Providers (ISPs). In the environments, a unique IPv6 address prefix is assigned to each connection, and packets must be routed to the corresponding ISP not to be discarded as spoofed packets. Thus, end hosts send packets to a default gateway router regardless of the source address prefix, and the default gateway is responsible for forwarding packets to the corresponding ISP. However, routing through the default gateway can consume unnecessary bandwidth and increase latency due to the detouring. To address the issue, this study proposes a novel routing methodology that leverages both source and destination addresses to direct packets to corresponding Customer Premises Equipment (CPE) routers without transiting through the default gateway and modifying intermediate routers. Performance evaluations demonstrate that the proposed method achieves similar throughput compared to the routing through the default gateway reducing the maximum packet size due to encapsulation.