Proposal for a New Flow Label Definition
The MITRE Corporation
The IPv6 header includes a 20-bit Flow Label field. RFC 3697, "IPv6 Flow Label Specification" [1] specified this field and minimum requirements for using the field. This document first identifies several issues related to the current Flow Label specification; then it discusses the limitations of the current specification and the need for extending the definition to accommodate emerging applications and protocols; finally, a new Flow Label specification is proposed that enables more effective usage of this field.