Routing protocol for heterogeneous communication networks

摘要

The present invention is concerned with routing packets in a packet communication network including a first device (A) and a second device (B), wherein the two devices have first and second interfaces (0, 1) for accessing respectively a first and a second communication link, wherein the two links have distinct values of a respective link metric. The invention comprises assigning to the two interfaces of each device distinct IPv6 link-local addresses and a shared global IP address, and executing a routing protocol based on the assigned addresses. The invention facilitates routing in heterogeneous networks by enabling the networking layer to handle multiple communication interfaces of a given device as multiple nodes for routing in the network. Optimum routing decisions are reached which take into consideration the state of a link for each interface and that ultimately identify optimum paths across multiple link-layer technologies.