Christian,
[No hats on]
The practical consequence is that the current multicast based systems, in practice, do not run well over wireless networks. You may remember that, in San Diego, IPv6 was initially turned off on the WIFI network. Too many multicast packets were clogging the network. It could only be turned on again when the access points were reprogrammed with new software allowing for IPv6 neighbor discovery caching.
This is somewhat different from what I remember about the WLAN AP problems in San Diego. I thought the problem was related to new beta code that hadn't been tested in production. The vendor had implemented some sort of IPv4 ARP caching, but when they did a similar thing for IPv6 it wasn't fully cooked.
It does not have to be so. There is a lot of literature available on distributed hash table technologies, which provides for distributed resolution of binary identifiers in large networks without requiring multicast operation. We should be able to harness these algorithms and provide a version of neighbor discovery that does not require the use of either broadcast or multicast.
To the larger point about IPv6 requiring multicast, I think it is worth looking at approaches as you describe. However, I think the focus should be on networks (e.g., wireless) where supporting reliable multicast is difficult or expensive, not what started this thread (i.e., an apparently broken ethernet interface).
Could you flesh out what you are thinking about?
Thanks, Bob
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