Besides p2p, the other area where I think IPv6 might be superior to IPv4 is in multicast. But I have to admit I don't understand this very well, and I wonder if someone else here does, and would like to chime in.
I imagine a world where MLB generates a data stream of the Red Sox in the World Series. They send one data stream, and it multicasts to all the millions of people watching. The stream is kept as consolidated as possible from sender, out to the many receivers, which means, when a packet reaches the first router (suppose this router has 3 interfaces, A B and C) . suppose the packet is received on interface A, and there's at least one destination client on each of interface B and C, this router is the one which replicates the packet, sending one packet out B and another packet out C. And so it continues, from hop to hop to hop, expanding branches of the tree, minimizing the bottlenecks to send a single data stream to millions of destinations simultaneously. My understanding of multicast in IPv6 is that somehow somebody somewhere creates a multicast address, which is indistinguishable from any other IPv6 IP address, and then there are some rules or policies or procedures for some endpoints to subscribe to that address. I am very unclear on precisely how this process works. But then, I haven't really looked into it yet either. I wonder if my expectations are totally off? Does IPv6 multicast satisfy the scenario of video multicast to millions of simultaneous viewers?
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