27.1 Introduction

IPv4 allows up to 40 bytes of options to follow the fixed 20-byte header. Although 10 different options are defined, the most commonly used is the source route option. Access to these options is through the IP_OPTIONS socket option and we will demonstrate this with an example that uses source routing.

IPv6 allows extension headers to occur between the fixed 40-byte IPv6 header and the transport-layer header (e.g., ICMPv6, TCP, or UDP). Six different extension headers are currently defined. Unlike the IPv4 approach, access to the IPv6 extension headers is through a functional interface instead of forcing the user to understand the actual details of how the headers appear in the IPv6 packet.