| The Internet is currently expanding much faster than its creators had ever imagined. It recently became apparent that the existing version of Internet Protocol (IP) was inadequate to meet the performance and functional requirements for the Internet. In particular, insufficient addressing space directly restricts the growth of the Internet. A new version of IP, IPv6, has emerged as a replacement of the current IPv4. In the new version, Internet addressing space is expanded from 32 bits to 128 bits.; However, IPv6 is not just about fixing the Internet's addressing problem. The purpose of designing IPv6 has become to correct as many other things as possible in the Internet. One of the most important issues in the Internet is the increasing burden associated with routing. Owing to the growth of the Internet, the size of routing tables and amount of traffic to be routed are increasing at a high rate. The routing problem has become a bottleneck in the development of the Internet. With the increased address length in IPv6, novel addressing schemes are being proposed in order to solve the routing problem. In particular, to facilitate geographic-based routing techniques, one-eighth of the IPv6 addresses have been reserved for geographic-based addressing.; The motivation for a geographic-based addressing scheme arises from the potential advantages it offers such as establishing a unique mapping between the network entity and its real location, facilitating routing based on simple direction information, and supporting the mobility of network elements. Geographic-based addressing is straightforward to implement by incorporating a Global Positioning System (GPS) receiver into some or all network devices and encoding geographic information into the addresses. An overview of GPS, which provides accurate latitude, longitude and altitude position information, is included in this thesis. |
