Application of the Alternate-Marking Method to the Segment Routing Header
RFC 9947, “Application of the Alternate-Marking Method to the Segment Routing Header”, is an Experimental document published in March 2026 by G. Fioccola, T. Zhou, G. Mishra, X. Wang, G. Zhang, M. Cociglio. The canonical text is published by the RFC Editor.
Abstract
This document describes an alternative experimental approach for the application of the Alternate-Marking Method to Segment Routing for IPv6 (SRv6). It uses an experimental TLV in the Segment Routing Header (SRH); thus, participation in this experiment should be between coordinating parties in a controlled domain. This approach has potential scaling and simplification benefits over the technique described in RFC 9343, and the scope of the experiment is to determine whether those are significant and attractive to the community.
This protocol extension has been developed outside the IETF as an alternative to the IETF's Standards Track specification RFC 9343 and it does not have IETF consensus. It is published here to guide experimental implementation and ensure interoperability among implementations to better determine the value of this approach. Researchers are invited to submit their evaluations of this work to the Independent Submissions Editor or to the IETF SPRING Working Group as Internet-Drafts.
What “Experimental” means
Describes a specification that is part of a research or development effort, published so the community can gain experience with it.
The canonical text of RFC 9947 is hosted at rfc-editor.org. Available in HTML,TXT,PDF,XML.
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