This article provides an overview of 2 broad categories of networking standards: Internet Protocols (IP) and Internet of Things (IoT) protocols.

1. Internet Protocols

The authoritative source for technical standards related to IP, both IP version 4 (IPv4) and IPv6, is embodied in a set of Request for Comments (RFC) documents produced by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) standards development organization (SDO), as described in these IETF RFCs: 

1. RFC 8711 Structure of the IETF Administrative Support Activity, Version 2.0 and 
2. RFC 8712 The IETF-ISOC Relationship.

Other internet standards organizations operate under the auspices of the Internet SOCiety (ISOC).

The IETF maintains a website of technical reference documents for both IPv4 and IPv6, including:

1. RFC 3901 DNS IPv6 Transport Operational Guidelines,
2. IETF draft document DNS IPv6 Transport Operational Guidelines,
3. RFC 5952 A Recommendation for IPv6 Address Text Representation,
4. RFC 6540 IPv6 Support Required for All IP-Capable Nodes requiring that all new products must support IPv6 and updates to existing products should support IPv6. This RFC further requires that IPv6 support must be equivalent or better in quality and functionality when compared to IPv4 support,
5. RFC 6877 464XLAT: Combination of Stateful and Stateless Translation,
6. RFC 8200 Internet Protocol, Version 6 (IPv6) Specification announcing that IPv6 was an internet standard,
7. IETF draft document A Simple BGP-based Mobile Routing System for the Aeronautical Telecommunications Network,
8. RFC 8504 IPv6 Node Requirements defining common functionality required in all routers and other network devices that support IPv6,
9. RFC 8683 Additional Deployment Guidelines for NAT64/464XLAT in Operator and Enterprise Networks,
10. RFC 8925 IPv6-Only-Preferred Option for DHCPv4 allowing IPv4-enabled and IPv6-only nodes to co-exist on a local area network, and
11. IETF proposed standard RFC 9673 IPv6 Hop-by-Hop Options Processing Procedures specifies procedures for processing IPv6 Hop-by-Hop options in IPv6 routers and hosts.

In addition to SDOs in the United States (US), there are a number of international networking SDOs, including the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) and the European Association for Standardizing Information and Communication Systems (ECMA). ETSI maintains a set of IPv6-related standards here, and a number of technical groups including Software Development Groups (SDG). ECMA maintains a set of data communications standards here.

The Réseaux IP Européens (RIPE) Network Coordination Centre (NCC) is one of five Regional Internet Registries (RIRs). It maintains a listing of policy documents followed by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) and the five RIRs. Policy documents on that listing which contain the word RIPE in the title apply only to the RIPE NCC RIR while policy documents on that listing without the word RIPE in the title apply to the IANA, the RIPE NCC RIR and the other four RIRs.

The Broadband Forum, which is an organization encompassing a wide range of Digital Subscriber Line- (DSL), Asynchronous DSL- (ADSL), and Internet Protocol/Multi-Protocol Label Switching- (IP/MPLS) networking devices, maintains IPv6-related technical reports here. In particular, see Technical Reports (TR) TR-124 Issue 9, TR-177 Issue 1 Corrigendum 1, TR-181 Issue 2 Amendment 19 Corrigendum 1, and TR-187 Issue 2 comprising BroadbandSuite 7.0 release, Dec, 2014 (also referred to as the IPv6 Toolkit, according to this press release), as well as TR-242 Issue 2, Feb 2015, and TR-296, Nov 2013.

2. Internet of Things (IoT) Protocols

This article provides a wide-ranging overview of IoT-related protocols and standards.

The IETF has published:

1. RFC 4919 IPv6 over Low-Power Wireless Personal Area Networks (6LowPANs): Overview, Assumptions, Problem Statement, and Goals,
2. RFC 4944 Transmission of IPv6 Packets over IEEE 802.15.4 Networks, 
3. RFC 6282 Compression Format for IPv6 Datagrams over IEEE 802.15.4l-Based Networks,
4. RFC 6550 RPL: IPv6 Routing Protocol for Low-Power and Lossy Networks,
5. RFC 7252 Constrained Application Protocol, 
6. RFC 7925 Transport Layer Security (TLS)/Datagram Transport Layer Security (DTLS) Profiles for the Internet of Things, 
7. RFC 8025 IPv6 over Low-Power Wireless Personal Area Network (6LowPAN) Paging Dispatch,
8. RFC 8138 IPv6 over Low-Power Wireless Personal Area Network (6LowPAN) Routing Header,
9. RFC 8505 Registration Extensions for IPv6 Over Low-Power Wireless Personal Area Networks (6LoWPAN) Neighbor Discovery,
10. RFC 8520 Manufacturer Usage Descriptions (MUD) Specification, 
11. RFC 8576 Internet of Things Security: State of the Art and Challenges, 
12. RFC 8655 Deterministic Networking Architecture,
13. RFC 8928 Address-Protected Neighbor Discovery for Low-Power and Lossy Networks,
14. RFC 8930 On Forwarding 6LowPAN Fragments over a Multi-Hop IPv6 Network,
15. RFC 8931 IPv6 over Low-Power Wireless Personal Area Network (6LowPAN) Selective Fragment Recovery,
16. RFC 9006 TCP Usage Guidance in the Internet of Things (IoT), 
17. RFC 9008 Using RPI Option Type Routing Header for Source Routes, and IPv6-in-IPv6 Encapsulation in the RPL Data Plane,
18. RFC 9010 Routing for RPL (Routing Protocol for Low-Power and Lossy Networks) Leaves,
19. RFC 9011 Static Context Header Compression and Fragmentation (SCHC) over LoRaWAN, 
20. RFC 9019 A Firmware Update Architecture for the Internet of Things,
21. RFC 9030 An Architecture for IPv6 over the Time-Slotted Channel Hopping Mode of IEEE 802.15.4 (6TiSCH),
22. RFC 9685 Listener Subscription for IPv6 Neighbor Discovery Multicast and Anycast Addresses,
23. IETF draft document Reliable and Available Wireless Architecture, and
24. IETF draft document Architecture Based on IPv6 and 5G for IIOT.

The IETF also maintains an IoT Topics of interest website, a blog post of IoT-related current efforts, and a blog post of MUD-related current efforts.

Wikipedia articles survey the rapidly growing Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) and the Internet of Military Things (IoMT), sometimes referred to as the Military Internet of Things (MIoT), the Internet of Battle Things (IBT), or the Internet of Battlefield Things (IoBT).

ETSI maintains a series of Internet of Things (IoT) related standards documents.

The ECMA Technical Committee 53 (EC53) is developing and has published standards enabling the use of Javascript on IoT devices.

Individuals have also developed IoT Javascript Frameworks.

(Note: If you are just starting to think about deploying Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) or are still in the pre-planning phases of an IPv6 deployment, please review the Before you Begin article in the Deployment section. This will help you better understand the information provided below.)

This Overview of Lessons Learned article contains five major topics:

1. Lessons learned by Organizations from countries around the world,
2. Defense Research and Engineering Network (DREN) IPv6 Pilot lessons learned summaries
3. DREN IPv6 Pilot lessons learned details,
4. Recipients of DREN IPv6 Pilot lessons learned, and
5. Lessons learned from protocol transitions prior to IPv4.

While not limited to the topic of deploying IPv6, the article 8 Lessons from 20 Years of Hype Cycles provides lessons that are relevant to the topic of deploying IPv6. Through repeated successful reuse, lessons learned become recognized as best practices that are known to produce good outcomes when followed. Some best practices are described in documents listed in the United States (US) IPv6 and IoT Policy, Guidance, and Best Practices and Non-United States IPv6 and IoT Policy, Guidance, and Best Practices articles in the General Information section. Additional best practices with an emphasis on security are described in documents in the IPv6 and IoT Security Best Practices article in the Security section.

Organizations that believe Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) is not in their future cannot simply ignore it, as this article explains with a touch of irony, while this article ends with the warning: “the question is not when you should begin managing IPv6, but what should you be doing right now!”. 

This article from the American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN) describes the business case for IPv6. This document from the Internet SOCiety (ISOC) describes some of the global trends that are driving deployment of IPv6. This article goes even further, explaining why IPv4 will not be in your future.

Organizations that believe the Internet of Things (IoT) is in their future should read this article. Even organizations that abandoned earlier efforts to transition to an IPv6-only network (such as Microsoft) will eventually make such a transition.

Even though you may have decided that your organization, network, or enclave does not need to deploy IPv6 at the present time, you cannot safely and securely ignore IPv6. IPv6 is quite likely already present on your network. As a case in point, if you have ever watched a YouTube video, you have used IPv6. If you used a cellphone to view this web page, IPv6 was used when connecting to the IPv6 Knowledge Base website, as this article explains.

The title of this article 7 points your security team needs to know about IPv6 (but probably doesn’t) speaks for itself.

The presentation Security in an IPv6 World (Myth and Reality) and the detailed series of 10 IPv6 Security Myth articles:

#1 I'm Not Running IPv6 So I Don't Have to Worry
#2 IPv6 Has Security Designed In
#3 No IPv6 NAT Means Less Security
#4 IPv6 Networks are Too Big To Scan
#5 Privacy Addresses Fix Everything
#6 IPv6 is Too New to be Attacked
#7 96 More Bits, No Magic
#8 It Supports IPv6
#9 There Aren't Any IPv6 Security Resources and
#10 Deploying IPv6 is Too Risky 

discuss the risks of ignoring IPv6 and the benefits of taking action to minimize those risks.

This article Common Misconceptions about IPv6 Security (video available here) touches on the same myths and adds some new ones:

IPv6 is more/less secure than IPv4
IPv6 is IPv4 with longer addresses
IPsec makes IPv6 more secure than IPv4
Address scanning is impossible in IPv6
No NAT makes IPv6 insecure.

The articles It’s fake news and It’s fake news (cont) along with an article asserting that quantum computing successfully merges IPv4 and IPv6 to form IPv5 provide yet another perspective on IPv6. (By the way, this article explains why there was no IPv5.)

This article describes tools and techniques that can detect the presence of IPv6 on your network. The presence of undetected IPv6 on networks has long been recognized as a concern, as shown by this Federal Information Notice and this warning about Malware Tunneling in IPv6, both issued by the United States-Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT) in 2005.

The specific steps necessary to disable or uninstall IPv6 on many routers and operating systems are described in articles in the IP Transport section. As a minimum the National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST) recommends that organizations not yet deploying IPv6 should block all incoming and outgoing IPv6 traffic (native and tunneled) on the organization's perimeter border routers or firewalls. (See Section 6.9 of NIST Special Publication 800-119, Guidelines for the Secure Deployment of IPv6, December, 2010.) These tunneling mechanisms include 6over4, 6to4, IPv6-in-IPv4, ISATAP, and tunnel brokers (which all typically use protocol 41) and the TEREDO tunneling mechanism (which typically uses UDP port 3544 to establish its tunnel). In addition, border routers or firewalls should block packets with a source or destination address prefix of 192.88.99.0/24 (the default prefix for public 6to4 anycast gateways).

   Sites running a Postfix version 2.2 (or later) mail transfer agent (MTA): You must  
   include the following in your /etc/postfix/main.cf:

            inet_protocols = ipv4

   Without this line, Postfix defaults to using IPv6 for mail delivery, and when that fails
                                    Postfix will stop trying. Postfix will not use IPv4 without it.

Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) is not backwards compatible with IPv4, so networks must be changed to deploy IPv6.

This IPv6 Knowledge Base Initial Introduction provides an overview of the structure of the Defense Research and Engineering (DREN) IPv6 Knowledge Base. The IPv6 Knowledge Base consists of nine major sections, with links to those sections appearing in the column on the left side of every IPv6 Knowledge Base article:

1. An overview of the General Information section
2. An overview of the Deployment section
3. An overview of the IP Transport section
4. An overview of the Infrastructure section
5. An overview of the Network Management section
6. An overview of the Security section
7. An overview of the Applications section
8. An overview of the Testing section
9. An overview of the IPv6 and IoT Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) section.

1. The General Information section contains articles covering a wide variety of information about IPv6, from policy and standards to what to do if an organization is not going to deploy IPv6, as follows:

• The IPv6 Knowledge Base Initial Introduction article you are currently reading provides an overview of the structure and scope of the IPv6 Knowledge Base.
• An IPv6 Not Needed Here!?! article briefly describing the actions that should be taken by organizations that have decided not to deploy IPv6.
• A United States (US) IPv6 and IoT Policy, Guidance, and Best Practices article providing a list of policy, guidance, and best practices documents issued by organizations inside the United States.
• A Non-United States IPv6 and IoT Policy, Guidance, and Best Practices article providing a list of policy, guidance, and best practices documents issued by organizations outside the United States.
• An Overview of Lessons Learned Deploying IPv6 article providing high-level summaries and discussions from multiple points of view of lessons learned deploying IPv6 by various United States (US) Department of Defense and other US Federal government departments and agencies, private organizations, and academia (both in the US and around the world), as well as for the home and Small Office/Home Office (SOHO) user.
• An IPv6 and IoT Networking Standards article providing a general overview of the documents that define networking standards and the organizations that develop and publish them.
• An IPv6 and IoT Points of Contact article listing communities and public forums involved in IPv6 and IoT planning and deployment efforts.

2. The Deployment section contains articles discussing various aspects of deploying IPv6, including:

• A Before you Begin article about things to consider before planning an IPv6 deployment.
• An Overview of Process which provides planning material, information about the approaches used to deploy IPv6 by organizations of all types (US Federal government departments and agencies, Internet Service Providers, businesses, and academic institutions), all sizes (from international enterprises to small businesses and individual users), and locations (in the US and around the world), and in-depth information on management, planning, and deployment processes.
• An IPv6 “Boiler Plate” Acquisitions Language article providing an overview of US and European regulations governing the acquisition process and examples of language developed by various organizations to be used in solicitations and acquisition documents.
• An IPv6 Training and Learning article providing information on training available at no cost or from commercial entities and free sources for learning about IPv6, and a limited amount of tutorial information.
• An IPv6 Transition Mechanisms article providing a quick overview of the various IPv6 transition mechanisms that are available.
• An IPv6 Software article that identifies many software products that either support IPv6 or are IP-protocol neutral.
• An IPv6 in the Home and Small Office/Home Office (SOHO) article about the IPv6 deployment process in the Home and SOHO.

3. The IP Transport section contains articles about the specifics of enabling and (when required) disabling IPv6 in many different computer operating systems (several versions of Linux, Apple macOS and OS X, Microsoft Windows, and UNIX, as well as others) and router firmware (Nokia [formerly Alcatel-Lucent], Extreme Networks, Cisco, and Juniper).

4. The Infrastructure section contains articles about the specifics of installing and configuring software that supports IPv6 infrastructure services, such as web, email, DNS, and DHCP servers. It also contains articles about selected infrastructure topics, such as cloud, VPN, and Microsoft Windows services/servers.

5. The Network Management section contains articles about planning for and deploying wide-area, enterprise, and site networks that support IPv6, guidance and examples for obtaining IPv6 address allocations, guidance and examples for Address Plans, recommended management practices, and troubleshooting tips and techniques.

6. The Security section contains articles about best practices, general and specific (Check Point, Cisco, Juniper, and several versions of software based) router and firewall firmware configuration guides, Internet Protocol Security, Trusted Internet Connection, and Windows Internet Connection Sharing.

7. The Applications section contains articles providing guidance for and examples of developing, enabling, and testing applications software to support IPv6, specifics of configuring and using IPv6 web browsers, and describing IPv6 support in selected applications such as Java and Kerberos.

8. The Testing section contains articles about IPv6 product and network test techniques in general, formal IPv6 product test programs and the testing results they provide, and IPv6 network testing results.

9. The IPv6 and IoT Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) section provides information about topics of interest to people new to IPv6 and IoT, including information about this IPv6 Knowledge Base and other websites that provide general information about IPv6 and IoT, information about the deployment status of IPv6, and information about developing or enabling applications to support IPv6.