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IPv6 : Internet Protocol version 6

6:13:00 PM Ashish Rana 2 Comments Category :



Just like a phone number helps you communicate with another phone, an IP address is provided to your computer so it can communicate with websites, Internet services, and other devices. IP addresses are numbers that are displayed as strings of letters or numbers,
such as 192.0.2.1 (for IPv4) and 2001:db8::1234:ace:6006:1e (for IPv6).
IPv4 is the current version of the Internet Protocol, the identification system the Internet uses to send information between devices. This system assigns a series of four numbers (each ranging from 0 to 255) to each device.
e.g. 172.16.254.1



IPv4 only allows for about approximately 4.3 billion addresses and the Internet needs more room than that.
The problem is that the current Internet addressing system, IPv4, only has room for about 4.3 billion addresses -- not nearly enough for the world's people, let alone the devices that are online today and those that will be in the future: computers, phones, TVs, watches, fridges, cars, and so on. More than 4 billion devices already share addresses. As IPv4 runs out of free addresses, everyone will need to share.
During the first decade of operation of the Internet (by the late 1980s), it became apparent that methods had to be developed to conserve address space. In the early 1990s, even after the redesign of the addressing system using a classless network model, it became clear that this would not suffice to prevent IPv4 address exhaustion, and that further changes to the Internet infrastructure were needed.
IPv6 is the new version of the Internet Protocol and expands the number of available addresses to a virtually limitless amount–340 trillion trillion trillion addresses.
Clearly the internet needs more IP addresses. How many more, exactly? Well, how about 340 trillion trillion trillion (or, 340,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000)? That's how many addresses the internet's new IPv6, can handle.
That's a number big enough to give everyone on Earth their own list of billions of IP addresses. Big enough, in other words, to offer the Internet virtually infinite room to grow, from now into the foreseeable future.
An IPv6 address is represented by 8 groups of 16-bit values, each group represented as 4 hexadecimal digits and separated by colons (:).
For example: 2001:0db8:0000:0000:0000:ff00:0042:8329



The hexadecimal digits are not case-sensitive; e.g., the groups 0DB8 and 0db8 are equivalent.
Each group of the IPv6 address can have a maximum value of ‘FFFF’ that is 1111111111111111 or we can say that each group can be of 16 bits.
There are 8 groups in an IPv6 address, hence an IPv6 address can be of 128 bits (8X16 bits).
IPv6 uses a 128-bit address, allowing 2128, or approximately 3.4×1038 addresses, or more than 7.9×1028 times as many as IPv4, which uses 32-bit addresses. IPv4 allows only approximately 4.3 billion addresses.
World IPv6 Launch on June 6, 2012, was organized by the Internet Society, participating major websites and Internet Service Providers (ISPs) for permanently enabling IPv6 and begins the transition from IPv4.
A very obvious question which might arise in one’s mind is ‘Was there ever IPv5?’
Then here is the answer - Version 5 was reserved for the Internet Stream Protocol developed prior to IPv6–it was never widely deployed and will not be used publicly.

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