Surveys recent and current standardization work by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) on Internet communication protocols. The author describes the IPng project and the IPv6 protocol that will form the basis for upper-layer protocols such as resource reservation, transport and application level protocols. The IETF decided in 1992 to develop a new version of the Internet Protocol (IP) because the available address space of IP version 4 (IPv4) will probably run out early in the 21st Century. The need for a new IP version provided the opportunity to redesign the protocol and add new functions.