Huawei Technologies Huawei Technologies Bell Canada China Telecom China Mobile China Unicom Toyota Motor Corporation Individual Futurewei Technologies Ltd. Network operators are facing the challenge of providing better network services for users. As the ever developing 5G and industrial verticals evolve, more and more services that have diverse network requirements such as ultra-low latency and high reliability are emerging, and therefore differentiated service treatment is desired by users. However, network operators are typically unaware of which applications are traversing their network infrastructure, which means that only coarse-grained services can be provided to users. As a result, network operators are only evolving their infrastructure to be large but dumb pipes without corresponding revenue increases that might be enabled by differentiated service treatment. As network technologies evolve including deployments of IPv6 and SRv6, the programmability provided by IPv6 and SRv6 encapsulations can be augmented by conveying application related information into the network. Adding application knowledge to the network layer allows applications to specify finer granularity requirements to the network operator. This document analyzes the existing problems caused by lack of application awareness, and outlines various use cases that could benefit from an Application-aware IPv6 Networking (APN6) architecture.