Re: Broadening the IPv6 discussion

[Petri Helenius <pete () he iki fi>]

itojun () iijlab net wrote:
>         one area that might be of interest is internet gaming.  nowadays,
>         all gaming client will connect to the central server, and all traffic
>         from client to another client has to go through the central server

This is a feature. It makes cheating a lot of harder if you don't have access
to the binaries to hack around to give yourself superpowers against the other
players.

>         for video-chat between clients (because of NAT, it is not possible for
>         clients to communicate directly).
>         it has two major issues:
>         - game operators has to prepare giant server that can handle thousands
>           of clients
>         - traffic to server will be severe, if we are to support client-to-
>           client video-chat

Video and voice even represents a valid application (and has done so for 5+
years) for true peer networking. 
>         with IPv6 (without NAT), server can just introduce client A's address
>         to B, and let them video-chat directly.  so game operators will be
>         able to reduce the size of central server, and traffic to server will
>         be decreased.  so for game operators, IPv6 has major (commercial)
>         benefit.

Remember that for this to happen, you also need multicast. And since IPv4 
multicast never happened, how will IPv6 multicast? If you don't have multicast,
the client would have to replicate the packets and that would lead to upstream
congestion since most consumer connections are assymetric in nature.

Pete