The point in time when IP addresses would have been completely allocated (and hence no new networks could have attached to the Internet) was the subject of considerable debate.  Based on current trends in address allocation, the estimates of the two leaders of the IETF's Address Lifetime Expectations working group were that addresses would becom exhausted in 2008 and 2018 respectively [Solensky 1996] .  In 1996, the American Registry for Internet Number (ARIN)  reported that all of the IPv4 class A addresses have been assigned, 62% of the class B addresses have been assigned, and 37% of the class C addresses have been assigned [ARIN 1996].  While these estimates and numbers suggested that a considerable amount of time might be left until the IPv4 address space became exhausted, it was realized that considerable time would be needed to deploy a new technology on such an extensive scale, and so the "Next Generation IP" (IPng) effort [Bradner 1996, RFC1752]was begun. An excellent on-line source of information about IPv6 is The IP Next Generation Homepage.

IPv6 Packet Format

The format of the IPv6 packet is shown in Figure 4.6-1. The most important changes introduced in IPv6 are evident in the packet format:

• Expanded addressing capabilities.  IPv6 increases the size of the IP address from 32 to 128 bits.  This insures that the world won't run out of IP addresses. Now, every toaster on the planet can be IP-addressable (to access the IP addressable soda machine click here).   In addition, the address space contains additional hierarchical structure, allocating portions of the enlarged address space to geographical regions [RFC 1884].  In addition to unicast and multicast addresses, a new type of address, called an anycast address, has also been introduced, which allows a packet addresses to an anycase address to be delivered to any one of a group of hosts.  This feature could  be used, for example, to send an http GET to the nearest of a number of mirror sites that contain a given document.
• A streamlined 40 byte header.  As discussed below, a number of IPv4 fields have ben dropped or made optional. The resulting 40-byte fixed-length header allows for faster processing of the IP packet.  A new encoding of options allows for more flexible options processing.
• Flow labelling and priority.  IPv6 has an elusive definition of a "flow."  [RFC 1752] and [RFC 1883] state this allows "labelling of packets belonging to particular flows for which the sender requests special handling, such as a non-default quality of service or real-time service."  For example, audio and video transmission might likely be treated as a flow.  On the other hand, the  more traditional applications, such as file transfer and email might not be treated as flows.  It is possible that the traffic carried by a high-priority user (e.g., someone paying for better service for their traffic) might also be treated as a flow.  What is clear, however, is that the designers of IPv6 forsee the eventual need to be able to differentiate among the "flows," even if the exact meaning of a flow has not yet been determined.  The IPv6 header also has a 4-bit priority field. This field, as the TOS field in IPv4, can be used to give priority to certain packets within a flow, or it can be used to give priority to datagrams from certain applications (e.g., ICMP packets) over packets from other applications (e.g., network news).

The IPv6 packet format is shown in Figure 4.6-1.  As noted above, a comparison of Figure 4.6-1 with Figure 4.5-1 reveals the simpler, more streamlined structure of the IPv6 packet.  The following packet fields are defined in IPv6:

• version. This four bit field identifies the IP version number.  Not surprisingly, IPv6 carries a value of "6" in this field.  Note that putting a "4" in this field does not create a valid IPv4 packet (if it did, life would be a lot simpler -- see the discussion below regarding the transition from IPv4 to IPv6.
• priority.  This four bit field is similar in spirit to the ToS field we saw in IP version 4.  [RFC 1883] states that values 0 through 7 are to be used for priority among traffic that is congestion-controlled (i.e., for which the source will back off on detection of congestion), while values 8 through 15 are used for non-congestion controlled traffic, such as constant bit rate real-time traffic.
• flow label.  As discussed above, this field is used to identify a "flow" of packets.
• payload length. This 16-bit value is treated as an unsigned integer given the number of bytes in the IPv6 packet following the fixed length, 40 byte packet header.
• next header.  This field identifies the protocol to which the contents (data field) of this packet will be delivered.  The field uses the same values as the Protocol field in the IPv4 header.
• hop limit.  The contents of this field are decremented by one by each router that forward the packet.  If the hop limit count reaches zero, the packet is discarded.
• source and destination address.  An IP v6 address has the following structure:

• data.  This is the payload portion of the IPv6 packet.  When the packet reaches its destination, the payload will be removed from the IP packet and passed on to the protocol specified in the nex header field.

• Fragmentation/Reassembly.  IPv6 does not provide for fragmentation and reassembly.  If an IPv6 packet received by a router is too large to be forwarded over the outgoing link, the router simply drops the packet and sends a "Packet Too Big"  ICMP error message (see below)  back to the sender. The sender can then resend the data, using a smaller IP packet size.  Fragmentation and reassembly is a time-consuming oeprating; removing this functionality from the routers and placing it squarely in the end systems considerably speeds up  IP forwading within the network.
• Checksum. Because the transport layer (e.g, TCP and UDP) and data link (e.g., Ethernet) protocols in the Internet layers perform checksumming, the designers of IP probably felt that this functionality was sufficiently redundant in the network layer that it could be removed.  Once again, fast processing of IP packets was a central concern.  Recall from our discussion of IPv4 in section 4.4.1, that since the IPv4 header contains a TTL field (similar to the hop limit field in IPv6), the IPv4 header checksum needed to be recomputed at every router.  As with fragmentation and reassembly, this too was a costly operation in IPv4.
• Options. An options field is no longer a part of the standard IP header.  However, it has not gone away. Instead, the options field is one of the possible "next headers" pointed to from within the IPv6 header.  That is, just as TCP or UDP protocol headers can be the next header within an IP packet, so too can an options field. The removal of the options filed results in a fixed length, 40 byte IP header.

Recall from our discussion in section 4.4.1, that the ICMP protocol is used by IP nodes to report error conditions and provide limited information (e.g., the echo reply to a ping message)  to an end system.  A new version of ICMP has been defined for IPv6 in [RFC 1885].  In addition to reorganizing the existing ICMP type and code definitions that we saw earlier in Table 4.4.3, ICMPv6 also added new types and codes required by the new IPv6 functionality.  These include the "Packet Too Big" type, and an "unrecognized IPv6 options" error code.  In addition, ICMPv6 subsumes the functionality of the Internet Group Management Protocol (IGMP) that we will study in section 4.6. IGMP, which is used to manage a host's joining and leaving of so-called multicast groups, was previously a separate protocol from ICMP in IPv4. 

Transition Mechanisms: from IPv4 to IPv6

Now that we have seen the technical details of IPv6, let us consider a very practical matter: how will the public Internet, which is based on IPv4, be transitioned to IPv6?  The problem is that while new IPv6-capable systems can be made "backwards compatible", i.e., can send, route, and receive IPv4 packets, already deployed IPv4-capable systems are not capable of handling IPv6 packets.  Several options are possible.

One option would be to delcare a "flag day" - a given time and date when all Internet machines would be turned off, be upgraded from IPv4 to IPv6.   The last major technology transition (from using NCP to using TCP for reliable transport servce) occurred almost 20 years ago.  Even back then [RFC 801], when the Internet was tiny and still being administered by a small number of "wizards," it was realized the such a flag day was not possible.  A flag day involving hundreds of millions of machines and millions of network administrators and users is even more unthinkable today.   [RFC 1993] describes two approaches (which can be used either alone or together) for gradually integrating IPv6 hosts and routers into an IPv4 world (with the long term goal, of course, of having all IPv4 nodes eventually transition to IPv6).

Probably the most straightforward way to introduce IPv6-capable nodes is a dual stack approach, where IPv6 nodes also have a complete IPv4 implementation as well.   Such a node, referred to as IPv6/IPv4 node in [RFC  1993], thus has the ability to send and receive both IPv4 and IPv6 packets.  When interoperating with an IPv4 node, an IPv6/IPv4 node can use IPv4 packets; when interoperating with an IPv6 node, it can speak IPv6.  IPv6/IPv4 nodes must have both IPv6 and IPv4 addresses.  They must furthermore be able to determine whether another node is IPv6-capable or IPv4-only.  This problem can be solved using the DNS (see chapter 2), which can return an IPv6 address if the node name being resolved is IPv6 capable, or otherwise return an IPv4 address.  Of course, if the node issuing the DNS request in only IPv4 capable, the DNS returns only an IPv4 address.

In the dual stack approach, if either the sender of the receiver is only IPv4-capable, IPv4 packets must be used.  As a result, it is possible that two IPv6-capable nodes can end, in essence, sending IPv4 packets to each other.  This is illustrated in Figure 4.6-3.  Suppose node A is IPv6 capable and wants to send an IP  packet to  node E,  which is also IPv6-capable. Nodes A and B can exchange an IPv6 packet.  However, node B must create an IPv4 packet to send to C. Certainly, the data field of the IPv6 packet can be copied into the data field of the IPv4 packet and appropriate address mapping can be done.   However, in performing the conversion from IPv6 to IPv4, there will be IPv6-specific fields in the IPv6 packet (e.g., the flow identifier field)  that have no counterpart in IPv4.  The information is these fields will be lost.   Thus, even though E and F can exchange IPv6 packets, the arriving IPv4 packets at E from D do not contain all of the fields that were in te original IPv6 packet send from A. .

An alternative to the dual stack approach, also discussed in [RFC 1993], is known as tunneling.  Tunneling can solve the problem noted above, allowing, for example, E to receive the IPv6 packet originated by A.  The basic idea behind tunneling is the following.  Suppose two IPv6 nodes (e.g, B and E in Figure 4.6-3)  want to interoperate using IPv6 packets, but are connected to each other by intervening IPv4 routers.  We refer to the  intervening set of IPv4 routers between two IPv6 routers as a tunnel, as illustrated in Figure 4.6-4.  With tunneling, the IPv6 node on the sending side of the tunnel (e.g., B) takes the entire IPv6 packet, and puts it in  the data (payload) field of an IPv4 packet.  This IPv4 packet is then addressed to the IPv6 node on the receiving side of the tunnel (e.g., E) and sent to the first node in the tunnel (e.g., C).   The intervening IPv4 routers in the tunnel route this IPv4 packet amongst themselves, just as they would any other packet, blissfully unaware that the IPv4 packet itself contains a complete IPv6 packet.  The IPv6 node on the receiving side of the tunnel eventually receives the IPv4 packet (it is the destination of the IPv4 packet!), determines that the IPv4 packet contains an IPv6 packet (homework question: how is this determined), extracts the IPv6 packet and then routes the IPv6 packet exactly as it would if it had received the IPv6 packet from a directly-connected IPv6 neighbor.

References

Copyright Keith W. Ross and Jim Kurose, 1996-1998.  All Rights Reserved.