Comparison of various IPv6 flow label formats for end-to-end QoS provisioning

Multimedia real time applications are rapidly growing across the Internet. The significant growth of such type of traffic indicates the need to provide special treatment across the Internet. Current Internet which is based on IPv4 is unable to provide more than the best effort service. IPv6 as the next generation protocol has the greater capability to fulfill the requirements of newly emerging real time applications. IPv6 packet header has added a field called Flow Label for enhancing the QoS capabilities. Definition for Flow Label field has not been standardized so far and various specifications are found in literature. Each one has its own merits and demerits. Existing Flow Label definitions can be analyzed to find the optimal Flow Label definition or to propose the new definition after considering the merits and demerits of existing Flow Labels. The paper also presents the analysis parameters for IPv6 Flow Label definition and provides the comparison of existing Flow Label Formats.