
260 Part Two • IPv6 Protocols
In an effort to remedy the faults of the Type of Service approach used
in IPv4, an early goal of the IPv6 effort was to replace ToS with the
concept of flows, which were to behave somewhat like behavior aggre-
gates. The Flow Label field in the IPv6 header was first discussed in the
early 1990s with RFC 1809, “Using the Flow Label Field in IPv6.” This
specification was published half a year before the original IPv6 specifica-
tions in 1995. At that time, the field raised more questions than it
answered,
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including how to determine which packets should be assigned
a flow and how routers should handle flows that they didn’t have