RFC 6294 · INFORMATIONAL · 2011

Survey of Proposed Use Cases for the IPv6 Flow Label

Overview

RFC 6294, “Survey of Proposed Use Cases for the IPv6 Flow Label”, is an Informational document published in June 2011 by Q. Hu, B. Carpenter. The canonical text is published by the RFC Editor.

Abstract

The IPv6 protocol includes a flow label in every packet header, but this field is not used in practice. This paper describes the flow label standard and discusses the implementation issues that it raises. It then describes various published proposals for using the flow label and shows that most of them are inconsistent with the standard. Methods to address this problem are briefly reviewed. We also question whether the standard should be revised. This document is not an Internet Standards Track specification; it is published for informational purposes.

Abstract as published in the RFC, via rfc-editor.org.

What “Informational” means

Published for the general information of the community. It does not define an IETF standard and carries no standards-track status.

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