Henry Gorman, hgorman@smu.edu

Grady Green, grady.green@hickam.af.mil

Jason Weeks, jason.weeks-1@nasa.gov

Electrical Engineering Department

 Bobby Lyle School of Engineering

Southern Methodist University

6251 Airline Rd

Dallas, TX 75205

Abstract– IPv6 is an interesting topic for every single Telecommunication Engineer; which is designed for the next generation by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). The emerged IPv6 to replace the IPv4 due to exhaustion; besides Internet Global communities require double number of IP addresses in the next 10 years. Therefore, IPv6 has the capability to provide up to number of IP addresses that can use for billion years. Other beneficial features include: stateless address auto-configuration, multicast, security implementation, simplified processing, jumbo grams, mobility, and extensive options.

Keywords:  Internet Protocol Version 6 (IPv6), DHCPv6, ICMPv6, Voice-Over-IP (VoIP), Name Resolutions, Routing Functions, Mobility.

1. INTRODUCTION

The Internet Protocol version 6, or IPv6 for short is known for the next generation Internet protocol to replace the limited Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4).  Because of the limitation of the IPv4 with 32-bit is not suitable for future expansion of Internet usage; especially more Internet users in the dense populated nations like China, India, United States, Indonesia, and etc.  The Internet Engineering Task Force had great vision in predicting IPv6 is needed to overcome the expansion; therefore, in the early 1994, IETF drafted up documents to support new development.  It is documented under RFC (Request for Comment) 2460. Other benefits of IPv6 include more features, functionalities, and especially higher security enforcement (Hagen, 4).  The IPv6 uses 128-bit in its address compares to 32-bit in IPv4, which would allow approximate 3.4 x 10³⁸ addresses.  In addition to the larger number IPv6 addresses can eliminate from using network translation addresses.  One of the most important about improving the features is quality of service (QoS); especially most telephony has been migrating to digital by using voice-over-Internet Protocol (VoIP).  In other words, IPv6 has 8-bits traffic-class to provide the better quality of service and avoid data loss, and jitter (latency).  The domain name resolution has benefit from the IPv6 in improvement.  The multicast listener discovery is embedding into ICMPv6 to provide better routing function.  Although there are many benefits of IPv6 for current and future usages, what has been developed to devote the telecommunication communities?    

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