IPv6 Diversities

IPv6

Yesterday 8^th June 2011, the world marked the world IPv6 day. a rare but landmark occurrence where leading ISPs and the World Wide Web at large tested the IPv6 relative infrastructure.

IPv6 is the next-generation Internet protocol, which offers a large number of IP addresses, 296 (= 79228162514264337593543950336) times of what IPv4 has to offer. An easy way to distinguish between IPv6 from IPv4 is the structure of the IP address. A typical IPv6 address looks like 2001:db8: cafe::1, as compared to an IPv4 address 192.168.148.1.

Why the migration

Since 1981, IPv4 has been the publicly used version of the Internet Protocol and it is currently the foundation for most Internet communications. The rapid growth of the Internet being experienced has mandated a need for more addresses than they can be possibly be rendered by IPv4.IPv4 space is quickly becoming exhausted, necessitating the migration to IPv6 which allows for vastly more addresses. The demand for IP addresses have been fuelled by the fact that every device that uses communication e.g. phones, printer’s e.t.c needs an IP address! You can use IPv6 tunnels if your ISP does not offer IPv6 connectivity yet.

IPv6 uses 128 bits as apposed to IPv4 which uses 32 bit. IPv6 uses 128 bits (16 byte) long address. So the number of addresses available in IPv6 already removes the main problem that we face with IPv4 which is the inevitable exhaustion point. A heuristic comparison, IPv6 has a lot more addresses than IPv4 the main reason why IPv6 is seen as the future. This is approximately three hundred and forty trillion, trillion, trillion addresses. Comparing this to IPv4's address space of "4,294,967,296" or approximately four billion, it's possible to see the shear size of IPv6 address space. The facts show that it is almost impossible to run out of IPv6 addresses and still, there’s a heated debate that IPv4 will not run out in the near future since the rate of addresses required by customers has slowed down in the last few years.

Advantages of IPv6

Though the IPv6 space is large, that does not mean it is unstructured. In simple terms 64 bits are used for network identification and the remaining 64 bits are used for the host identification. This expansion allows for many more devices and users on the internet as well as extra flexibility in allocating addresses and efficiency for routing traffic.

It eliminates the primary need for network address translation (NAT), which gained widespread deployment as an effort to alleviate IPv4 address

IPv6 implements additional features not present in IPv4. It simplifies aspects of address assignment i.e. stateless address auto configuration, network renumbering and router announcements when changing Internet connectivity providers.

The IPv6 subnet size has been standardized by fixing the size of the host identifier portion of an address to 64 bits to facilitate an automatic mechanism for forming the host identifier from link layer media addressing information.

Network security is also integrated into the design of the IPv6 architecture, and the IPv6 specification mandates support for IPsec as a fundamental interoperability requirement.

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