Analysis And Research Of IPv6 Unicast Data Forwarding

The successful development of Internet changes people's life greatly. But the IPv4 protocol can't meet the demands of Internet application. In such a case, IETF issued the IPv6 after comparing different kinds of IPng (IP next generation) in the 1990's. As the most wildly used address format, the packet forwarding plane and the control plane of the unicast address are always the most important focuses in any communication range. For the importance of IPv6, the unicast area still needs continuous studies although it has been developed a lot.Starting with the analysis of a series of relevant RFC (Request for Comment) standards, this thesis presents the contents, the message formats and the handling rules of IPv6 unicast data forwarding and its correlative protocols. The emphases of analysis are ICMPv6, Neighbor Discovery Protocol, relevant IPv6 routing protocol and the way they support IPv6 unicast data forwarding.Because the IPv6 unicast data forwarding involves many IPv6 protocols and routing protocols, at present there is few systematic studies on it, nor any analysis on how these protocols support this technology definitely. In addition, there is no study either on IPv6 unicast data forwarding under heterogeneous network of Windows XP and RedHat Linux 9.0.To validate the consistency of the packets, the options, and the main work of the relevant protocols of IPv6 unicast data forwarding with RFC standards under herterogeous environment, two types of test environment are designed. One is for the case where the source host and the destination host are on the same link;and the other is for the different links. In both cases, one host is running RedHat Linux 9.0, and the other running Windows XP. Two hosts are connected into the different topologies which are constructed with an Ethernet switch and two Cisco IPv6 routers. The host running Windows XP is also used to do router configuration and to examine routing table. In order to observe the data packets in the IPv6 data forwarding, Ethereal is used to capture the packets on hosts. All these are used to complete the validation of correlative protocols of IPv6 unicast data forwarding. The tests done show that ICMPv6, Neighbor Discovery Protocol, address autoconfiguration and RIPng Protocol are accordance with RFC2461, RFC2462,RFC2463 and RFC2080, respectively. While testing, we also found and proved something not mentioned in RFC 2080 that an interface of a router can be put into two RIP router domains at the same time.