Internet Protocol Version 6 (IPv6)

The IPv4 came before the IPv6 and these datagrams are similar in many ways but also differ in more ways than one. IPv6 came out in the year 2004 and still uses many of the features that made IPv4 so successful. IPv6 is supposed to become the new standard over the older version of IPv6, but it is tough for v6 to take its spot when v6 cannot support everything v4 does, basically v6 cannot connect to a v4 system. Some differences are that it is stated that the IPv6 is more secure than the IPv4, the address size went from 32 bits in the IPv4 to 128 bits in the IPv6, extensible protocols are more flexible in the IPv6, IPv4 and IPv6 are not compatible, the IPv4 will not be able to support additional nodes or support for applications, and the

The reminder of the paper is organized as follows. In section Ⅱ, the format of Ipv6 address and its packet header are introduced. In section Ⅲ, a comparison between Ipv6 and Ipv4 is conducted from multiple aspects. In section Ⅳ, the challenge of current Ipv6 development and installing is described.

With the rapid growth of the Internet after commercialization in the 1990s, it became evident that far more addresses than the IPv4 address space has available were necessary to connect new devices in the future. By 1998, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) had formalized the successor protocol. 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 and provides approximately 4.3 billion addresses. The two protocols are not designed to beinteroperable, complicating the transition to IPv6. However, several IPv6 transition mechanisms have been devised to permit communication between IPv4 and IPv6

With admirable foresight, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) initiated as early as in 1994, the design and development of a suite of protocols and standards now known as Internet Protocol Version 6 (IPv6), as a worthy tool to phase out and supplant IPv4 over the coming years. There is an explosion of sorts in the number and range of IP capable devices that are being released in the market and the usage of these by an increasingly tech savvy global population. The new protocol aims to effectively support the ever-expanding Internet usage and functionality, and also address security concerns.

The Internet is, quite literally, a network of networks. It is comprised of ten thousands of interconnected networks spanning the globe. The computers that form the Internet range from huge mainframes in research establishments to modest PCs in people's homes and offices. Despite the recent hype, the Internet is not a new phenomenon. Its roots lie in a collection of computers that were linked together in the 1970s to form the US Department of Defense's communications systems. Fearing the consequences of nuclear attack, there was no central computer holding vast amounts of data, rather the information was dispersed across thousands of machines. A set of rules, of protocols, known as TCP/IP was

IPv6 is not a solution for security, however, in light of the fact that few security issues

Internet Protocol version 6 was first proposed in the 1990s by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). IPv6 was to be the predecessor of IPv4. It was designed to support the Internet’s extensive growth and address security concerns through packet-level encryption and stepped-up authentication. It would also allow routers to better manage traffic flow through such features as packet labeling. (The Tortured History of Internet Protocol v6).

Since its advent the Internet has been making its way into very farfetched corners of the world, allowing people to virtually reduce distances. Now the Internet was based on a notion called IP (Internet Protocol), Internet Protocol Version 4 (IPv4) to be exact. Now as the number of computer connected to the Internet grows, the amount of numbers in the IPv4 protocol was finite. Simply put, there are 2^32 useful addresses in IPv4 (subtracting the loopback and the non-routable). With all the connected computers (and growing) this number looks very small. That being said the number of non-allocated IPs is decreasing at a very fast pace. To cater to this problem IPv6 is brought forward. Although there are a lot of problems with the implementation, it certainly brings forward a huge pool of addresses supplemented by some really good security benefits. Some of them include decreased vulnerability to the man in the middle attacks and larger atmosphere surface area, making worm proliferation less effectual. While some may consider these benefits to be negligible, they should be embraced within a set economic cost.

Efficient and hierarchical addressing and routing infrastructure - IPv6 global addresses that are used on the IPv6 portion of the Internet are designed to create an efficient, hierarchical, and summarizable routing infrastructure that is based on the common occurrence of multiple levels of Internet service providers.

The TCP/IP protocols are the heart and soul of the Internet, and they describe the fundamental rules that govern all communications in the network. The original address system of the Internet is Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4). The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) developed IPv6 to deal with the long-anticipated problem of IPv4 address exhaustion. However, IPv6 is not foreseen to supplant IPv4 instantaneously.

The internet matured in the 1970's as a result of the Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP), which is sill used today. It was adopted by the U.S. Department of Defense in 1980, and universally adopted in 1983. The usage of TCP/IP is what unites all elements of the net. Both public domain and commercial implementations of the roughly one hundred protocols of the TCP/IP protocol suite became available in the 1980's. During the early 1990's, Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) protocol implementations also became available by the end of 1991, the Internet has grown to include some 5,000 networks in over three dozen countries, serving over 700,000 host computers used be over 4,000,000 people. By December 1996, about 627,000 Internet domain names had been registered and now there are more than 30 million registered.

Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4) is the fourth version of the Internet Protocol (IP) and it is only protocol widely used for the communication purpose in the computer networks and it works in the Internet layer of the OSI reference model. The IPv4 address is 32 bits long. The 32 bit is divided into four groups. Each group has the eight bits which forms as an octet. Each IP address has two parts called the network id and the host id. This IP address is used as a unique identification address for the hosts in the networks. Network ID also known as network address used to identify the network from the large internetwork. All the computers in the same network will have the same network ID. Host ID is also known as host address used to identify the host in the same network. There are five classes of IPv4 address. They are Class A, Class B, Class C, Class D and Class E. Class A, Class B and Class C are most commonly used, Class D is multicast and Class E is for the research and the development purpose. These classes of IP addresses are used in different location based on the network infrastructure.

IPV4 is made up of 32-bit addresses, as opposed IPV6 which has 128-bits, and this obviously larger address space has become necessary because the world is running short of IPV4 addresses. Most of the internet now uses IPV4, so this discussion will mostly concentrate on IPV4. A lot of the ideas discussed here have been gleaned from a web site of a company called TutorialsPoint, and also credit is due to Tanenbaum and Whetherall (2011).

With the rapidly approaching global shortage of IPv4 addresses, the current version of Internet Protocol is slowly getting into its limitation of address space and its insufficient security features. IPv6 is the next generation of IP addressing. Used on the internet and on many LANs and WANs that is designed to meet the shortage of IPv4. When IPv4 (a 32-bit system) can have approximately 4 billion total theoretical addresses, while on the other hand, IPv6 (128-bit) can have a total of 340 undecillion theoretical addresses; a far greater total. Various limitation of the system will drastically reduce that number, but the remaining result is still

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