End-to-End QoS Provisioning by Flow Label in IPv6

IPv6 as IP next generation is the successor to IPv4. IPv6 not only solves the shortcomings problem of IPv4 address, but also benefits the QoS especially during network congestion. Flow label field in IPv6 packet header provides an efficient way for packet marking, flow identification, and flow state lookup. This paper proposes the end-to-end QoS provisioning mechanism by utilizing 3-tuple instead of 5-tuple in IPv6 header, i.e. using flow label and traffic class to reserve resources to achieve customized QoS provision. This is also simulated in ns-2 network simulator, and results show the performance of the proposed mechanism is maintained during network congestion.