"A collection of protocols needs to be agreed upon, so vendors of equipment used in home networks will have an interoperable suite of protocols available," said Ralph Droms, a distinguished engineer for Cisco and among those who want to form the IETF working group.

Such a group, should it be approved by the IETF, would specify how IPv6 could be deployed in the home in an easy and consistent manner, using protocols developed by the IETF.

Commercial network providers and large organizations are at how to use IPv6, which is the successor to today's chief communications protocol for the Internet, Internet Protocol version 4. Not much work has been done to address the issue of getting homes to use IPv6, however.

Home networking is a fairly new area for the IETF. Many of its standards were designed for large-scale organizational networks, rather than home use.

"Home networking grew on-demand, by accident," Droms said. The first home consumer Internet connections often relied on a single dynamically allocated IP address assigned to the connecting computer whenever a user would dial by modem into a service provider.