1. Introduction

This document defines basic IPv6 features for a residential or small-office router, referred to as an "IPv6 CE router", in order to establish an industry baseline for features to be implemented on such a router.

These routers typically also support IPv4.

Mixed environments of dual-stack hosts and IPv6-only hosts (behind the CE router) can be more complex if the IPv6-only devices are using a translator to access IPv4 servers [RFC6144]. Support for such mixed environments is not in scope of this document.

This document specifies how an IPv6 CE router automatically provisions its WAN interface, acquires address space for provisioning of its LAN interfaces, and fetches other configuration information from the service provider network. Automatic provisioning of more complex topology than a single router with multiple LAN interfaces is out of scope for this document.

See [RFC4779] for a discussion of options available for deploying IPv6 in service provider access networks.

The document also covers the IP transition technologies that were available at the time this document was written. Two transition technologies in 6rd [RFC5969] and DS-Lite [RFC6333] are covered in the document.