Abstract
This project provides an overview into the life cycle of a cable modem. It demonstrates the initialization stages a cable modem would pass through. Once self-initialization of a cable modem is complete, it comes online. This project discusses the state machine transitions pursued by a cable modem. The focus of the project is to demonstrate how a cable modem acquires an IPv6 address for its operation from the network. A dummy process running on the other end would act as a very basic DHCPv6 server to provide IPv6 address to the requesting host, which happens to be a cable modem in our case. The cable modem logs the message received from the dummy process in a log file. Docisis 3.0 specification from Cable Labs titled as, "MAC and Upper Layer Protocols Interface Specification" is used as a strong guideline. Other sources of data include the DHCPv6, IPv6 RFC’s from IETF.