IPv6 as a Practical Solution to Network Management Challenges

Over the paste decade, IPv6 community's efforts to promote the next generation of the IP protocol revolved around generating business models that would justify the migration costs. The context, a depleting global address pool, and the target, global services, missed on one interesting opportunity for IPv6. Larger IP Service Provider and Enterprise networks are running out of IPv4 resources to manage their devices. Alleviating this problem with the help of IPv6 would be more valuable to them in the immediate future than providing user services. This paper reviews the current interest in leveraging IPv6 for management and it analyzes few possible protocol extensions that would enable its use in this role to a larger extent. While the paper discusses some of the challenges faced by these deployment proposals, it contends that this could be a reasonable and practical first step in the early adoption of IPv6 in large networks