Re: IPv6 Formal Anycast Addresses and Functional Anycast Addresses (Fwd: New Version Notification for draft-smith-6man-form-func-anycast-addresses-01.txt)

[Fred Baker <[e-mail]>]

On Nov 3, 2019, at 9:23 AM, Nick Hilliard <[e-mail]> wrote:
> If you create an anycast protocol which has characteristics which are sufficiently different to unicast that it requires a separate addressing schema, then by all means it would be appropriate to create an addressing schema to fit in with this.  The determinant here would be that global unicast addresses would not be usable for this protocol. Until then, a separate address block is mostly a matter of aesthetics.

I would agree. I did some poking around to identify anycast address groups. The IANA has records for three. RFC 4291 has a fourth, which is subnet anycast which is supposed to get a packet to a router I'm not sure I can say how widely deployed any of those are. 

https://www.iana.org/assignments/ipv6-anycast-addresses/ipv6-anycast-addresses.xml
RFC 2526             Mobile IPv6 Home-Agents anycast
ETSI EN 302 636-6-1  IPv6 over GeoNetworking geographic anycast	
RFC 4291             IPv6 Anycast Subnet-Router Anycast Address

On the other hand, there are a number of unicast addresses in daily use worldwide as anycast, which are the addresses one uses to access the DNS root. Collected statistics tell us that on the order of 10% of DNS requests to the root use IPv6, and the rest are IPv4. So I would say that the use of unicast addresses as anycast has a strong supporting case.

https://www.iana.org/domains/root/servers
https://root-servers.org/

The one use case that your draft mentions that seemed to be new was that of a network operator that wanted to deploy an anycast service, but only to its customers. It, however, seemed to be hypothetical. Do you know of operators or services that have that requirement?

In other words, I'm wondering whether there is a problem being solved, or an architectural preference.