Several years ago, the IETF took on the initiative to develop a version of DHCP for IPv6 (DHCPv6). The specification became a Dynamic Host Configuration working group (DHC WG) work item and has been under development in that working group since the initiative was started.

There are a couple of reasons for the long development and approval process for DHCPv6. While DHCPv6 is similar to DHCPv4 [RFC2131], [RFC2132] in its goals and scope, all of the details of the protocol operation are different. For example, because the configuration of an interface with multiple IPv6 addresses is a fundamental feature of IPv6, DHCPv6 can manage the assignment of multiple addresses, potentially assigned over a period of time. In contrast, DHCPv4 can only assign a single address to an interface. Dhcpv6 also addresses several deficiencies in the DHCPv4 protocol, including the operation of relay agents and security.

Another reason for the long development period for DHCPv6 is that there has been some debate in the IETF about the utility and role for DHCPv6, so the specification has been tracking a moving target.

There have been many significant changes to the DHCPv6 specification in the revisions of the DHCPv6 Internet-Draft. Implementations of earlier drafts will not interoperate with the final specification as documented in RFC 3315 [RFC3315].

One question about the use of DHCPv6 is the specification of stateless address autoconfiguration. For IPv4, the primary use of DHCP is the assignment of IP addresses to hosts. In IPv6, a host can use stateless address autoconfiguration to obtain its IPv6 addresses independent of any server-based address assignment mechanism. However, a host that has used stateless address autoconfiguration may still require additional configuration information, such as a list of addresses for DNS servers. Thus,“Stateless DHCPv6”, specified in RFC 3736 [RFC3736], is used to provide these additional configuration parameters.