The Seattle SAGE Group
IPv6 -- What's UP?
What's happened since June, 1997?
(Remember the Rat Book?) http://cellworks.washington.edu/sage/1997/06/ipv6_i.html
Most importantly, "The core set of IPv6 protocols were made an IETF Draft
Standard on August 10, 1998" (from playground.sun.com/pub/ipng/html/ ) The next
step is to be a full Internet Standard.
Protocol changes/enhancements: (RFC's
available at http://playground.sun.com/pub/ipng/html/specs/specifications.html )
- The RFC for IPv6 protocol specification is new as of December, 1998
- Work has been done on address allocation mechanisms.
- Work has been done on multi-homed addressing mechanisms.
- ICMPv6 was updated
- JUMBOGRAMS - ftp://ftp.isi.edu/in-notes/rfc2675.txt --
'A "jumbogram" is an IPv6 packet containing a payload longer than 65,535
octets.' Will allow UDP and TCP packets up to 4 Gigabytes to traverse
networks. Still limited by the MTU of the network path. Remember
MTU Discovery will has the capability to determine the maximum MTU
from the source to the destination, given multiple paths exist on
the network from the source to the destination.
- Header compression mechanisms have been suggested for slow links -- dialup
and wireless are obvious uses.
- A new RFC for Generic Packet Tunneling has been submitted (RFC 2473)
- Programming interfaces have been specified. W. R. Stevens was the
primary author on these, defining the socket interfaces.