Introduction

Version 6 of the Internet Protocol (IPv6) has finally arrived in practical form! Although the protocol has been worked on for close to ten years now, official specifications and standards have only recently been finalized, and there are still some aspects of the protocol that are being worked on by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) working groups. The issues that made version 4 of the Internet Protocol (IPv4) inadequate required complex solutions. This has forced designers of the new protocol to work diligently to ensure that the same issues would not be encountered with the new version of the protocol. Members of the Internet community who were responsible for developing the protocol carefully scrutinized each new Request for Comments (RFC) that was developed. For those not familiar with the RFC process, RFCs are documents that detail the protocol specifications so that hardware and software manufacturers will know how to implement the protocol in a standard and agreed-upon manner. Standardization enables each manufacturer and software vendor to follow the same blueprint rather than developing proprietary versions of the protocol. (This was a common problem with earlier networking protocols.)

The realization of a new, scalable protocol in which considerable thought has been given to future expansion is a very exciting concept. Never before has the Internet community seen such a magnitude of effort or planning put into the development of a new protocol, and there has certainly never been a protocol more specifically tailored to the growth of the Internet.