RFC 1678 (rfc1678) - Page 2 of 8
IPng Requirements of Large Corporate Networks
Alternative Format: Original Text Document
RFC 1678 IPng Requirements of Large Corporate Networks August 1994
IPng, IPng must offer compelling advantages and an easy migration
path.
Corporate networks must meet promised levels of service while
controlling costs through efficient use of resources. The IETF
should consider both technical solutions (such as service classes and
priorities) and administrative ones (such as accounting) to promote
economy.
Many businesses will not connect to a network until they are
confident that it will not significantly threaten the
confidentiality, integrity, or availability of their data.
Corporations tend to use multiple protocols. Numerous forces stymie
the desire to settle on just one protocol for a large corporation:
diverse installed bases, skills, technical factors, and the general
trend toward corporate decentralization. The IETF needs a strategy
for heterogeneity flexible enough to accommodate the principal
multiprotocol techniques, including multiprotocol transport,
tunneling, and link sharing.
Some of these requirements might be satisfied by more extensive
deployment of existing Internet architectures (e.g., Generic Security
Service and IPv4 type of service). The current Internet protocols
could be enhanced to satisfy most of the remaining requirements of
commercial users while retaining IPv4. Nevertheless, some
corporations will be scared away from TCP/IP by the publicity about
the address space until the IETF sets a direction for its expansion.
Migration and Coexistence
As the use of IPv4 continues to grow, the day may come when no more
IPv4 network addresses will be left, and no additional networks will
be able to connect to the Internet. Classless Inter-Domain Routing
(CIDR, RFC 1519) and careful gleaning of the address space will
postpone that cutoff for several years. The hundreds of millions of
people on networks that do get IPv4 addresses won't be affected
directly by the exhaustion of the address space, but they will miss
the opportunity to communicate with those less lucky.
Because the Internet is too large for all its users to cutover to
IPng quickly, IPng must coexist well with IPv4. Furthermore, IPv4
users won't upgrade to IPng without a compelling reason. Access to
new services will not be a strong motivation, since new services will
want to support both the IPng users and the IPv4 users. Only
services that cannot exist on IPv4 will be willing to use IPng
exclusively. Moreover, if IPng requires more resources (e.g.,
storage, memory, or administrative complexity) than IPv4, users will
Britton & Tavs