7. Sending Packets

7. Sending Packets

When an upper-layer protocol sends a packet to a non-global destination address, it must have a means of identifying the intended zone to the IPv6 layer for cases in which the node is attached to more than one zone of the destination address's scope.

Although identification of an outgoing interface is sufficient to identify an intended zone (because each interface is attached to no more than one zone of each scope), in many cases that is more specific than desired. For example, when sending to a link-local unicast address from a node that has more than one interface to the intended link (an unusual configuration), the upper layer protocol may not care which of those interfaces is used for the transmission. Rather, it would prefer to leave that choice to the routing function in the IP layer. Thus, the upper-layer requires the ability to specify a zone index, when sending to a non-global, non-loopback destination address.