What benefits of IPv6 apart from large address space and elimination of NAT

Tomorrow, I will have a talk about IPv6 to be delivered to the technological community in Hong Kong Science Park.  One of the item touches on other benefits of IPv6 other than large address space and elimination of NAT.  I purposely scrap IPSEC. I have not seen or heard any practical application of IPSEC on IPv6.  The second to discard is flow label in header. This can be interpreted as QoS but as of today no all routers and devices can support flow label.  It is just there for future applications.

In my view, the benefit lies in efficient header removing a lot of out-dated fields  and optional messages can be packed in the form of extension headers.  On addressing, the hierarchal addressing scheme enables each ISP to simply advertises a  clean and lean /32 prefix.  Hence the size of the global routing table can be reduced which should  boost speed and performance of routers. The last I want to mention is path MTU discovery.  In IPv6, routers are not allowed to perform fragmentation and only the source and destination use path MTU to determine the maximum packet size.  This again reduces unnecessary workload to routers.  All these three distinctive features taken together sustain the claim that IPv6 is faster than IPv4 intrinsically.


The protocol IPv6 is a boring thing.  Frankly, I have no confidence to turn it into something interesting !