CRC extension header (CEH): A new model to handle transmission error for IPv6 packets over fiber optic links

The escalating growth of Web based services has led to the rapid growth of the Internet. This ever increasing growth of the Internet has led to the depletion of Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4) addresses. IPv6, the Next Generation Internet Protocol developed by IETF in the 1990s is getting wide spread in use replacing IPv4 to overcome its shortcomings including IP address exhaustion. IPv6 offers many advantages and features over IPv4 which could be utilized to handle some of the functions at layer 2 (data link layer, with reference to the ISO Model) so that the performance of processing packets in term of operations can be improved. One such function of interest is the frame check-sum found in Ethernet headers at the Data link layer. In this paper we show how error handling can be done at the Network layer instead of at the Data link layer by utilizing the extension header feature of IPv6, and the characteristics of the fiber optic medium. Our emulation results show, handling error utilizing IPv6 extension header at the Network layer has smaller packet processing time than handling it in the data link layer that need to check error in every node. Smaller packet processing time means faster transmission of IPv6 packets.