Abstract
Packets are the basic unit of data transfer in the Internet. Each packet essentially consists of a header that carries network control information apart from the payload part that contains useful information meant for transmission. The size of the header depends on the associated protocol and these headers are an overhead in terms of processing and bandwidth utilization. As packet size decreases, protocol overhead would increase since the header to payload size ratio becomes large. So packet size influences performance. Traffic on the Internet and LAN, which arc dominated by small packets aggravate the above problem of protocol overhead affecting the performance of packet transmission. The introduction of IPv6 as the Next Generation Internet Protocol has a host of advantages over IPv4 to leverage today's communication needs. Apart from its advantages IPv6 uses a significantly large header size when compared to IPv4 which could be handled efficiently so that network resources can be utilized efficiently. From our ongoing research work we put forward a modified IPv6 header format for packet transmission within a LAN. The modified IPv6 header format reduces the size of the IPv6 header. This would reduce IPv6 network protocol overhead by reducing the header to payload size ratio for small and moderate size packets increasing the performance of IPv6 packets transmitted over the Ethernet in terms of bandwidth utilization and throughput.