I am trying to convince myself that the IEEE 802.3ah working group
working on FTTH should not consider a proposal to increase the MTU
size of Ethernet beyond 1500 bytes. There is a strong likelyhood
that 802.3ah may require a redesign of SerDes chipsets, so why not
view this as an opportunity to recommend a physical layer design for
FTTH which is optimized for the likely use of IPv6. It will not do too
much good if the protocol stack is more busy doing addressing than
actually transporting application data due to the inability of the
underlying layer to bear a decent MTU size.
I am also listing the various approaches to transmit an FTTH IPv6
packet (e.g. H.263 video + G.726 audio over RTP, over UDP, over IPv4
over IPSecV6 over IPv6 with multiple source routing headers {up to 23 ipv6
addresses} and authentication), over multiple Ethernet frames without
using IPv6 packet fragmentation mechanisms.
Would it be possible for example to develop a new protocol number at the
Ethernet layer which would identify that two Ethernet frames that are back
to back, originating from the same MAC address, are to be considered glued
together across local links, by the destination IPv6 stack?
-=Francois=-
