Abstract
This article provides a description of the IPv6 protocol. It briefly covers the reasons that make IPv6 a necessary upgrade, describes the most important methods for transitioning networks, applications, and hosts from IPv4 to IPv6, and the possibilities that IPv6 opens up. It finally also examines the current status of IPv6 deployment and vendor, protocol, and application support.
Key Terms in this Chapter
DNS (Domain Name Service): A distributed database service developed in order to match IP addresses to human-readable names for easier location and retrieval of Internet services.
Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF): The organization comprised of a large open international community of network designers, operators, vendors, and researchers concerned with the evolution of the Internet architecture and the smooth operation of the Internet.
Quality of Service (QoS): The ability to provide specific guarantees to traffic flows regarding the network characteristics, such as packet loss, delay, and jitter experienced by the flows.
UDP (User Datagram Protocol): A connectionless, unreliable protocol of the TCP/IP protocol suite used for sending and receiving datagrams over an IP network.
IPv6 (Internet Protocol, version 6): The new version of the Internet protocol designed to replace IPv4, with the motivation of solving the address scarcity problem and improving protocol efficiency in additional areas.
MPLS (Multi-Protocol Label Switching): A datacarrying mechanism which emulates some properties of a circuit-switched network over a packet-switched network and was designed in order to provide a unified data-carrying service for both circuit-based clients and packet-switching clients which provide a datagram service model.
IPv4 (Internet Protocol, version 4): The version of the Internet protocol that has been used throughout the existence of the Internet.
DHCP (Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol): A protocol used for dynamic assignment of IP addresses to devices in a network.
TCP (Transmission Control Protocol): A connection-oriented, reliable protocol of the TCP/IP protocol suite used for managing full-duplex transmission streams.