IPv6 routing protocols offer the dynamic routing protocol solution for IPv6. Although the support of IPv6 will certainly spread to all routing protocols in time, currently only three routing protocols support IPv6 addressing. These protocols are RIP, IS-IS, and BGP. Although the RIP implementation was an entirely new standard, both IS-IS and BGP were updated to support IPv6.

RIP is a traditional distance-vector protocol whose roots go as far back as 1982. RIP is also an open-standard routing protocol, and therefore can be used to interconnect different vendors equipment. As a distance-vector routing protocol, RIP calculates its metric based on hop count and considers a network more than 15 hops away to be unreachable. The IPv6 implementation of RIP shares all the traditional mechanisms of RIP, because it performs metric calculation in the same fashion. IPv6 RIP also supports default routes, route redistribution, and route filtering

IS-IS is a traditional link-state routing protocol. Originally written to support CLNS routing, extensions were written into it to support IPv4 addressing and now IPv6 addressing. As a link-state routing protocol, IS-IS takes a more overall look of the network when determining the path to use to reach a destination network and will generally make a better routing decision because it is not concerned with hop count as much as it is with items such as bandwidth. IS-IS treats IPv6 support as an extension of the existing protocol instead of writing an entirely new protocol as was done in the case of RIP.