IPv6 Background

In 1992 the Internet Activities Board (IAB) discussed the suggestion made by Christian Huitema for the IPng (next generation). His suggestion was based on Connectionless Network Protocol (CLNP) of the International Standards Organization. This proposal failed due to the market failure of CLNP. Between the years 1992 and 1994 a few other teams tried to propose new standards. There were a few interesting proposals like TUBA, TP/IX and SIPP. TUBA is TCP and UDP over bigger Addresses, while TP/IX includes changes also in TCP and not only in IP, and SIPP is Simple IP Plus.

The directorate of IPng finally adopted SIPP but with some changes. It was later called IPv6 and not IPv5 because IPv5 was the name for an experimental real-time protocol. The recommendation for IPng was published in RFC 1752 in January 1995, and the software implementation began in 1996.