Paper Review: IP Next Generation Overview

Reviewer: Mark Meras (mm446)

Main Contribution

This paper by Rober Hinden discusses a new protocol, IPng (also known as IP v6), that is meant to succeed the IP v4 protocol that is commonly used today. Hinden argues for the necessity, viability and easy transition to the protocol as we move away from the PC-centric Internet to focus on consumer and mobile devices. Hinden describes the overall protocol and its advantages.

Key Ideas

IP v4 is not well designed for massive-scale global networks that will arise in the 21st century. A new protocol is needed. Areas requiring this scale of functionality are nomadic computing devices (mostly presented as consumer devices), networked entertainment, and device conAtrol.
The protocol must provide for a smooth transition. Some transition issues discussed are addressing (IPng uses 128 bit addresses, compared with 32 for IP v4), and how special capabilities in IPng will be implemented piecemeal
Discusses features of IPng
- Multicast addresses replace broadcast addresses; add "anycast" addresses
- 128 bit address space
- Header format simplification, improved support for options, QoS capabilities, authentication and privacy capabilities

Critique of Contribution

Hinden provides an overview of IPng, with a lot of details missing. Most importantly, it's not quite clear how the transition from IP v4 will occur. Hinden spends a lot of time describing features that would make the transition easier, but it's still not obvious how IP v4 routers will preserve IP v6 packets
Description of format and features is sufficient otherwise
Hinden does an excellent job presenting his argument for why IPng is necessary as well as talking in general about how it will be adapted. It is only the transition details that are lacking.

Lesson

We need a next-generation update to the Internet Protocol to allow for many more addresses and updated capabilities to deal with real-time data.

Open Question

How will the transition take place specifically? Will there be tools to assist users? Will new IP v6 routing hardware be built? These issues are still left open.