
268 Part Two • IPv6 Protocols
a specific transport connection or a media stream. However, a flow
is not necessarily 1:1 mapped to a transport connection.
One change from RFC 2460 is that flows can be specified without reference
to the destination address or transport layer protocol type. These values
may not always be available in the IPv6 header, particularly if the packet
is fragmented or encrypted.
The flow label may not be changed from the value assigned by the sender,
unlike the diffserv value, which may be modified to reflect the appropriate
behavior aggregate for a particular router or network as it traverses the
Internet. Routers that don’t offer flow-related ...