ImpRes: supporting services in IPv6 using the flow label and hop-by-hop option fields

In recent years the Internet has become increasingly popular. This increased popularity, combined with a broader range of applications, has revealed several shortcomings in the current version of the Internet Protocol, IPv4. In response the Internet community is developing an updated version of IP, IPv6. One of the new features of IPv6 is the ability to identify a stream of data within the Internet, making it possible to offer different qualities of service to different applications. A new protocol, the ImpRes protocol, is proposed in this paper to take advantage of this ability by reserving network resources for a data stream "on-the-fly". Using the IPv6 flow label field and a proposed IPv6 Hop-by-Hop option header field, a data stream can establish state information in network nodes, and adapt to changing network conditions or user requests by dynamically modifying the state information during the lifetime of the stream. Simulation results suggest that the proposed ImpRes protocol is a viable method for supporting better-than-best-effort services in an IPv6 environment.