The host part of an IPv6 address can be computed as the result of a hash function computer on the fully qualified domain name.
This eases the life of system administrators dealing with IPv6 networks.
Because the configuration of an IPv6 network is a rather daunting and error-prone procedure for system administrators. Each node must be provided with its own (128 bit long) IPv6 address and with a domain name manageable by human beings.
Autoconfiguration methods can give addresses to interfaces but do not provide any means of configuring the DNS. So autoconfiguration is suitable for clients. If a host has to act as a server, it must have a fully qualified domain name and the DNS service has to map its name to its IP address.
In the Internet of Thread scenario, the number of network nodes can be orders of magnitude higher than before, as each process or thread can be a node. This idea of hash based IPv6 addresses is a viable solution to the problem to manage the DNS resolution in IoTh environments.
The host part of an IPv6 address can be computed as the result of a hash function computer on the fully qualified domain name.
In this way it is possible to write a DNS server able to resolve the addresses of any hostname in a sub-domain provided the network prefix of that sub-domain.
The installation of a new node of the network (computer, namespace, IoTh process) is as simple as providing it with its IPv6 address (the one obtained by concatenating the network prefix and the host address computed by the hash function).
There is no need to change the configuration of the DNS.
Actually the installation of a new node (or its renaming) is even simpler than that. The host can use a DHCP service designed to get the right address from the DNS server given its fully qualified domain name.
So a system administrator has nothing to do more than assigning the new node its name. (They have just to baptize the new node)
iothnamed project implements a dns server providing hash based IPv6 addresses, namedhcp is a dhcp server able to retrieve IP addresses from a DNS using the fully qualified domain name (FQDN) field of the dhcp protocol.
Renzo Davoli, IPv6 Hash-Based Addresses for Simple Network Deployment, in: Proc. of AFIN 2013 : The Fifth International Conference on Advances in Future Internet, 2013, pp. 15 - 20