Title: 

Internet Protocol Version 6 IPv6

1
Internet Protocol Version 6 (IPv6)

 CSCI 397C- Advanced Network Management

 Sriram Raghunathan

2
IPv6 (IPng)

 IPng was recommended by the IPng Area Directors

of the Internet Engineering Task Force at the
Toronto IETF meeting on July 25, 1994, and
documented in RFC 1752, "The Recommendation for
the IP Next Generation Protocol" 1. The
recommendation was approved by the Internet
Engineering Steering Group on November 17, 1994
and made a Proposed Standard.

3
Introduction

 In 1973, TCP/IP was introduced to the ARPANET,

which at that time connected about 250 sites and
750 computers
 In the following two decades since that, the
Internet has grown into the dominant form of
global information communication.
 TCP/IP has mushroomed into a family of protocols
that provide a wealth of connectivity services.

4
Introduction (continued)

 The continued exponential growth of the Internet

has exposed underlying inadequacies in the
network's current technology. Today's base
technology, Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4)
was last revised in 1981 (RFC791), and for the
last several years the Internet Engineering Task
Force has been developing solutions for these
inadequacies. This solution, which has been given
the name IPv6, will become the backbone for the
next generation of communication applications.

5
IPv6 Critical Technology for Network
Connectivity in the 21st Century

 Twenty years from now the Internet will be

routinely used in ways just as unfathomable to
us, Virtually all the devices with which we
interact, at home, at work, and at play, will be
connected to the Internet the possibilities are
endless, and the implications staggering.
 Enabling the convergence of all these
capabilities will be "The Network", an evolution
of the current Internet, but still based on the
TCP/IP protocol. To function within this new
paradigm TCP/IP must evolve too, and the first
significant step in that evolution is the
development of the next generation of the
"Internet Protocol," Internet Protocol version 6,
or IPv6.
6
IPv6 Overview

 It is a new version of the Internet Protocol,

designed as a successor to IP version 4 2 and
is assigned IP version number 6 and is formally
called IPv6 3.
 IPv6 was designed to take an evolutionary step
from IPv4. It was not a design goal to take a
radical step away from IPv4. Functions that work
in IPv4 were kept in IPv6, but functions that
didn't work were removed.

7
IPv6 Overview (continued)

 The changes from IPv4 to IPv6 fall primarily into

the following categories
 Header Format Simplification
 Improved Support for Extensions and Options
 Expanded Addressing Capabilities
 Flow Labeling Capability
 Authentication and Privacy Capabilities

8
IPv6 Header Format

 IPv6 also improved packet headers, which are

quite different than IPv4's packet headers. IPv6
uses a header with a fixed length. In contrast,
IPv4's packet header is variable in size, which
creates more work for routers.
 With IPv6, there will be the capability to define
additional features such as QOS by using a
chaining mechanism. To keep the header as simple
as possible, the essential packet data resides in
the standard IPv6 header, and one field of the
header specifies whether the payload begins after
the header or whether there's another header.

9
IPv6 Header Format (continued)

 Additional IPv6 header types include routing

information, security encapsulation (encryption),
and fragmentation. Each of these headers has the
same "next header" field, which specifies how the
data succeeding it should be treated -- as the
payload or as an additional header.
 The Ipv6 header has a fixed length of 40 bytes,
consisting of the following fields as shown in
Fig. 1.

10
IPv6 Header Format (continued)
11
IPv6 Header Format (continued)

 Version 4-bit Internet Protocol version number

6.
 Priority 4-bit Priority value. See IPv6 Priority
section.
 Flow Label 24-bit field. See IPv6 Quality of
Service section.
  Payload Length 16-bit unsigned integer. Length
of payload, i.e., the rest of the packet
following the IPv6 header, in octets.
 Next Header 8-bit selector. Identifies the type
of header immediately following the IPv6 header.
Uses the same values as the IPv4 Protocol field
4.
 Hop Limit 8-bit unsigned integer. Decremented by
1 by each node that forwards the packet. The
packet is discarded if Hop Limit is decremented
to zero.
 Source Address 128 bits. The address of the
initial sender of the packet. See 5 for
details.
 Destination Address 128 bits. The address of the
intended recipient of the packet (possibly not
the ultimate recipient, if an optional Routing
Header is present).

12
IPv6 Extension Headers

 The IPv6 extension headers which are currently

defined are
 Routing---Extended Routing (like IPv4 loose
source route)
 Fragmentation---Fragmentation and Reassembly
 Authentication---Integrity and Authentication,
Security
 Encapsulation---Confidentiality
 Hop-by-Hop Option---Special options which require
hop by hop processing
 Destination Options---Optional information to be
examined by the destination node

13
Address Expansion

 The number one issue driving the need for IPv6 is

the rapid exhaustion of the available IPv4
network addresses.
 Currently, IPv4 uses 32-bit addresses, which are
represented as 4 bytes
 IPv6 uses 128-bit addresses, offering a
theoretical maximum of 340 trillion, trillion,
trillion hosts. To compare with the earth
surface, it is 6.210E22 IPv6 addresses per
square foot of earth surface.

14
Address Expansion (continued)

 There are three types of IPv6 addresses. These

are unicast, anycast, and multicast.
 Unicast addresses identify a single interface.
 Anycast addresses identify a set of interfaces
such that a packet sent to an anycast address
will be delivered to one member of the set.
 Multicast addresses identify a group of
interfaces, such that a packet sent to a
multicast address is delivered to all of the
interfaces in the group.
15
IPv6 Routing

 IPv4 uses a technique called Classless

InterDomain Routing (CIDR), which allows flexible
use of variable-length network prefixes.
 Routing in IPv6 is almost identical to IPv4
routing under CIDR except that the addresses are
128- bit IPv6 addresses instead of 32-bit IPv4
addresses.
 IPv6 also includes simple routing extensions that
support powerful new routing functionality. These
capabilities include
 Provider Selection (based on policy, performance,
cost, etc.)
 Host Mobility (route to current location)
 Auto-Readdressing (route to new address)

16
IPv6 Quality-of-Service Capabilities

 The Flow Label and the Priority fields in the

IPv6 header may be used by a host to identify
those packets for which it requests special
handling by IPv6 routers, such as non-default
quality of service or "real-time" service. This
capability is important in order to support
applications that require some degree of
consistent throughput, delay, and/or jitter.
These types of applications are commonly
described as "multi-media" or "real-time"
applications.

17
IPv6 QoS Capabilities (continued)

 Flow Labels
 A flow is a sequence of packets sent from a
particular source to a particular (unicast or
multicast) destination for which the source
desires special handling by the intervening
routers.
 A flow label is assigned to a flow by the flow's
source node. New flow labels must be chosen
(pseudo-) randomly and uniformly from the range 1
to FFFFFF hex.
 All packets belonging to the same flow must be
sent with the same source address, same
destination address, and same non-zero flow label.

18
Priority

 The 4-bit Priority field in the IPv6 header

enables a source to identify the desired delivery
priority of its packets, relative to other
packets from the same source.
 The Priority values are divided into two ranges
Values 0 through 7 are used to specify the
priority of traffic for which the source is
providing congestion control, and Values 8
through 15 are used to specify the priority of
traffic that does not back off in response to
congestion.
19
Priority (continued)

 For congestion-controlled traffic, the following

Priority values are recommended for particular
application categories
 0 Uncharacterized traffic
 1 "Filler" traffic (e.g., netnews)
 2 Unattended data transfer (e.g., email)
 3 (Reserved)
 4 Attended bulk transfer (e.g., FTP, HTTP, NFS)
 5 (Reserved)
 6 Interactive traffic (e.g., telnet, X)
 7 Internet control traffic (e.g., routing
protocols, SNMP)

20
Priority (continued)

 For non-congestion-controlled traffic, the lowest

Priority value (8) should be used for those
packets that the sender is most willing to have
discarded under conditions of congestion (e.g.,
high-fidelity video traffic), and the highest
value (15) should be used for those packets that
the sender is least willing to have discarded
(e.g., low-fidelity audio traffic). There is no
relative ordering implied between the
congestion-controlled priorities and the
non-congestion-controlled priorities.

21
Security

 The number one concern of senior IT professionals

and CEOs about connecting their organization with
Intranets and to the Internet is security. The
good news is that built into IPv6 are a whole
host of new security features, including system
to system authentication and encryption based
data privacy.

22
Security (continued)

 Two long-sought security options have already

been defined as extensions to the IPv6 header.
 The first mechanism, called the "IPv6
Authentication Header", is an extension header
which provides authentication and integrity
(without confidentiality) to IPv6 datagrams.
 The second security extension header provided
with IPv6 is the "IPv6 Encapsulating Security
Header". This mechanism provides integrity and
confidentiality to IPv6 datagrams.

23
The Transition to IPv6

 While a primary design goal of IPv6 is to ease

the transition from and co-existence with IPv4,
converting today's tens of millions of IPv4 based
systems to IPv6 will be a major challenge.
  The key transition objective is to allow IPv6 and
IPv4 hosts to interoperate. A second objective is
to allow IPv6 hosts and routers to be deployed in
the Internet in a highly diffuse and incremental
fashion, with few interdependencies. A third
objective is that the transition should be as
easy as possible for end- users, system
administrators, and network operators to
understand and carry out.

24
The Transition to IPv6 (continued)

 The IPv6 transition mechanisms provides a number

of features, including
 Incremental upgrade and deployment.
 Minimal upgrade dependencies.
 Easy Addressing.
 Low start-up costs.

25
The Transition to IPv6 (continued)

 The mechanisms employed by the IPv6 transition

mechanisms include
 An IPv6 addressing structure that embeds IPv4
addresses within IPv6 addresses, and encodes
other information used by the transition
mechanisms.
 A model of deployment where all hosts and routers
upgraded to IPv6 in the early transition phase
are "dual" capable (i.e. implement complete IPv4
and IPv6 protocol stacks).
 The technique of encapsulating IPv6 packets
within IPv4 headers to carry them over segments
of the end-to-end path where the routers have not
yet been upgraded to IPv6.
 The header translation technique to allow the
eventual introduction of routing topologies that
route only IPv6 traffic, and the deployment of
hosts that support only IPv6. Use of this
technique is optional, and would be used in the
later phase of transition if it is used at all.

26
IPv4 vs IPv6
27
Conclusion

 In summary, IPv6 is a new version of IP. It can

be installed as a normal software upgrade in
internet devices. It is interoperable with the
current IPv4. Its deployment strategy was
designed to not have any "flag" days. IPv6 is
designed to run well on high performance networks
(e.g., ATM) and at the same time is still
efficient for low bandwidth networks (e.g.,
wireless). In addition, it provides a platform
for new internet functionality that will be
required in the near future.