Abstract | IPv6 is the new version of the Internet Protocol (IP) that is expected to be introduced for a wide audience in the forthcoming years. IPv6 comes with a huge amount of improvements compared to the currently widespread IP version (IPv4), while it keeps the same conceptual basics. For instance, IPv6 has a comprehensive and built-in scheme for mobility management with a great set of additional functionality, while IPv4 has only an extension for this purpose (and it is usually not implemented). Considering the evolution of telecommunication architectures toward a heterogeneous all-IP fixed-mobile convergent multimedia-provisioning system, it is now obvious that only the appearance of IPv6 could extend the infrastructure to cope with the emerging scenarios and use-cases. This chapter provides a broad introduction of the advanced IPv6 features and guides the readers from the basics of the new IP protocol family to its complex feature set and power to support multimedia communications in the mobility-centric Future Internet. Optimization techniques to further increase the adequacy of IPv6 for mobile multimedia are also presented along with the description of several research directions. |
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