A few “visionary” in 1987 predicted that the number of networks connected to the Internet may reach one hundred thousand in a few years; however, most people did not care about their opinion. Most Internet users expected that it could happen only a few decades later. Well, it was not the case; the 100,000th network was connected to the Internet in 1996.
Additionally the IPv4 has been developed in the early 1970s for the high-tech industry, universities, and national security institutions. No one expected that over time the Internet will evolve to a commercial product and will provide services to millions of people. In this trend the appearance of an important appliance, called the Personal Computer (PC) had a significant role. In the 1980s and later, the continuous development of PCs and network devices sped up the growth of internetworking. Thus, it became necessary to create a protocol that not only solves the present problem of small address space but it is able to efficiently adapt to the users' present and future expectations.
The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) in 1990 began developing a new version of the Internet Protocol. The brief goals were the following:
to support billions of hosts even if the address space assignment is not optimal
to reduce the size of the routing tables
to simplify of the protocol, to make packet processing faster in the routers
to provide better IP based security (authentication and authorization)
to devote greater attention to the type of services, especially for real-time streams (Quality of service: QoS)
to help the usage of multicasting by defining scopes right in the IP layer
to open the opportunity of roaming for the hosts (mobility support)
to enable the further development of the protocol
to enable the coexistence of the old and the new protocol for many years until the conversion process finishes
After much debate and examination of several drafts, IETF finally chose the revised and combined proposal of Steven Deering and Paul Francis while the protocol’s name became Simple Internet Protocol Plus (SIPP). Then the IETF has started a new task force which released the first specification of the IPv6; called Internet Protocol, Version 6 (IPv6) Specification; and released it in RFC1883 (Deering, 1995) in late 1995. The current specification of IPv6 is in RFC2460 (Deering, 1998), compiled by Steven Deering and Robert Hinden, which phased out RFC1883 in 1998.