The Seattle SAGE Group
IPv6 -- What's UP?
Massively increased address space -- most pessimistic view is 1564 addresses per square meter for the planet earth.
Security at the protocol level -- both encryption and authentication mechanisms. Can apply to only the header, or entire datagram.
Quality of Service fields in headers to distinguish between batch (ftp-like) and realtime (audio, video, chat) priorities. Several levels available.
Compatible with IPv4 nodes
No en-route packet fragmentation (i.e all fragmentation done at source, re-assembly at destination). MTU discovery recommended.
Expanded capibility for multicast, anycast. Allowing packets to be directed to groups (i.e send this video packet to several disparate destinations around the world)