What Is a Flow?

A flow is a sequence of packets that are sent from a particular source to a particular (unicast or multicast) destination. The source also requires special handling by the intervening routers. The nature of the special handling might be conveyed to the routers by a control protocol. The control protocol can be a resource reservation protocol. The special handling also might be conveyed by information within the flow's packets, for example, in a hop-by-hop option.

Active flows from a source to a destination can be multiple and can contain traffic that is not associated with any flow. The combination of a source address and a nonzero flow label uniquely identifies a flow. Packets that do not belong to a flow carry a flow label of zero.

The flow's source node assigns a flow label to a flow. New flow labels must be chosen randomly (in a “pseudo” manner) and uniformly from the range 1 to FFFFF hex. This random allocation makes any set of bits within the flow label field suitable for use as a hash key by routers. The routers can use the hash key to look up the state that is associated with the flow.