Handling transmission error for IPv6 packets over high speed networks

The escalating growth of web based services has led to the rapid growth of the Internet. As such the current Internet protocol version 4 (IPv4) is rapidly running out of IP addresses. A new generation of IP known as IPv6 proposed and developed by the Internet engineering task force (IETF) is gaining popularity in wide-spread use today. IPv6 offers many advantages including large address space, simple header, security, mobility and extensibility, over IPv4. In the Internet, transmission of data from one computer to another passes through a series of layers with control information added as headers at each layer. The header overheads can be reduced if the functionalities in the headers can be handled efficiently. In this paper we propose to remove error handling at the data link layer and handle it at the network layer by utilizing the features of the IPv6 header especially extension header, and the characteristics of the high speed network medium. The proposed concept would reduce the overhead of the header at the data link layer resulting in increasing the data transfer rate and reducing the bandwidth utilization of IPv6 packets over high speed networks.