3 ms·
RFC 1726: Technical Criteria for Choosing IP the Next Generation (IPng) (1994)
- throw0101d 2y agoOne interesting observation from §5.5 Transition: We believe that it is not possible to have a "flag-day" form of transition in which all hosts and routers must change over at once. The size, complexity, and distributed administration of the Internet make such a cutover impossible. Rather, IPng will need to co-exist with IPv4 for some period of time. There are a number of ways to achieve this co-existence such as requiring hosts to support two stacks, converting between protocols, or using backward compatible extensions to IPv4. Each scheme has its strengths and weaknesses, which have to be weighed. Furthermore, we note that, in all probability, there will be IPv4 hosts on the Internet effectively forever. IPng must provide mechanisms to allow these hosts to communicate, even after IPng has become the dominant network layer protocol in the Internet. That last quoted paragraph is probably very accurate in retrospect.