Flows and Protocols

 The flow methodology is not only interesting for measurement applications, it has also been discovered by protocol designers. As already mentioned in the introduction, flows can be used to accelerate switching and routing. To ameliorate the effectiveness that `` flow switching'' has, protocol designers have started developing special flow-oriented protocols. In the ``IPng'' (Internet Protocol Next Generation, IPv6) protocol for example e a special field in the header has been reserved for future flow based applications. Another, more concrete development is Ipsilons flow management protocol, which is used to exchange flow-based routing policies between Ipsilon switches.