7. Internet developments. IPv6 protocol

One of the routing-related issues that has been discussed at length within the IETF concerns improving quality of service, partly as a result of traffic evolution. In addition to the traditional computer data transfers in this type of network (e-mail, file transfer, web...), the network is increasingly carrying multimedia data (radio or television broadcasts, Internet telephony...).

To achieve the qualities needed for these applications to be usable, the current Internet architecture needs to be modified. One approach is to differentiate the routing of data packets and multimedia packets to find an appropriate path. This approach is very difficult to implement. We have seen that guaranteeing route stability, even if the only routing criterion is the recipient's address, is a relatively complex task. QoS routing introduces even more instability, and can even lead...