The de facto standard Application Program Interface (API) for TCP/IP applications is the ”sockets” interface. Although this API was developed for (71) in the early 1980s it has also been implemented on a wide variety of non-Unix systems. TCP/IP (72) written using the sockets API have in the past enjoyed a high degree of portability and we would like the same (73) with IPv6 applications. But changes are required to the sockets API to support IPv6 and this memo describes these changes. These include a new socket address stmcture to carry IPv6 (74) , new address conversion functions, and some new socket options. These extensions are designed to provide access to the basic IPv6 features required by TCP and UDP applications, including multicasting, while introducing a minimum of change into the system and providing complete (75) for existing IPv4 applications.
