rfc3493.Basic Socket Interface Extensions for IPv6.pdfVIP

Network Working Group R. Gilligan Request for Comments: 3493 Intransa, Inc. Obsoletes: 2553 S. Thomson Category: Informational Cisco J. Bound J. McCann Hewlett-Packard W. Stevens February 2003 Basic Socket Interface Extensions for IPv6 Status of this Memo This memo provides information for the Internet community. It does not specify an Internet standard of any kind. Distribution of this memo is unlimited. Copyright Notice Copyright (C) The Internet Society (2003). All Rights Reserved. Abstract The de facto standard Application Program Interface (API) for TCP/IP applications is the sockets interface. Although this API was developed for Unix in the early 1980s it has also been implemented on a wide variety of non-Unix systems. TCP/IP applications written using the sockets API have in the past enjoyed a high degree of portability and we would like the same portability with IPv6 applications. But changes are required to the sockets API to support IPv6 and this memo describes these changes. These include a new socket address structure to carry IPv6 addresses, new address conversion functions, and some new socket options. These extensions are designed to provide access to the basic IPv6 features required by TCP and UDP applications, including multicasting, while introducing a minimum of change into the system and providing complete compatibility for existing IPv4 a