Research On IPv6 Packet Classification Algorithm Based On Flow Label

As the rapid development of Internet, IPv4 address scarcity is getting worse. This has been the introduction of IPv6 in order to solve this problem. So far, IPv6 has been in the large scale test, and in the initial deployment in Europe, Asia and North America.However, due to the changes of the protocols itself, especially the increased length of the address, the upgrading between IPv4 and IPv6 are not smoothly. Therefore, it will bring some inevitable challenges to the IP packet classification algorithms; for example, the traditional packet classification algorithms are sensitive to the length of the search keywords. If we directly upgrade the existing IPv4 packet classification algorithm to support IPv6, the performance could seriously decline. This means that packet classification algorithms should follow the development of IPv6 replacement. Meanwhile, IPv6 packet classification algorithm is still in its infancy and the comparison between algorithms require objective test criteria, that is, the set of IPv6 rules, however, the slow process of commercialization of IPv6 lead to a lack of the set of rules.The work in this paper can be divided into two parts. Firstly, from the comparison between IPv4 and IPv6, and learnt from the ClassBench of IPv4, ClassBenchV6 for IPv6 is proposed. And then, considering the fact that IPv6 packet classification algorithms may change due to RFC3697 definition, in which the five-tuple in IPv4 may change into triples in IPv6, and it will affect the design of IPv6 packet classification algorithms. Therefore, this paper proposes a IPv6 packet classification algorithm, which is based on flow label, the source IP address, and destination IP address.