Introduction

The IPv4 has served us well in the past; however, some design decisions made a couple of decades ago have many shortcomings for supporting current and future networking. The IPv6 is the new IP protocol that is designed to meet the requirements for supporting future generation networking, while interoperating with the current IPv4.

With the growing popularity of internetworking, it has become apparent that the number of nodes in the Internet will outgrow the 32-bit address space used in IPv4. Further, as the number of addressable nodes increases, the size of the routing table is likely to grow. The larger routing table degrades the performance of the IP network; this, and the shortage of address space, are the primary concerns for continued use of IPv4.

These concerns raised the need for a new IP protocol, IPv6. In addition to solving these problems, several other features have been incorporated in the design of IPv6 to enhance the IP network.

The advances in hardware technology have resulted in the development of new applications, which may need special provisioning when deployed over the network. However, the connectionless, ondemand nature of IPv4 does not lend itself well for per-connection-based support. The design of IPv6 includes flow labeling for providing per-connection-based support.

For continued success of IP internetworking, the use of the IP network should be plug-and-play, similar to the use of a telephone system. To achieve the plug-and-play concept in the IP network, configuration of an IP node should be simple, if not...