preview

Ipv4 Ipv6 : Ipv6 For The Reason Of Ipv4 Address Exhaustion

Better Essays

IPv6 is developed to replace IPv4 for the reason of IPv4 address exhaustion. Since there is a total of 32 bits in an IPv4 address, it only allows 4 billion unique addresses. On the other hand, the world population has already reached 7 billion in 2011. Ipv4 address space is not enough for everyone in the world to have one unique IP address, let alone each person has more than one devices currently, such as mobile phones, computers, tablets, GPS, and etc. In Ipv6, the address space has been expanded to 128 bits, allowing 340 trillion trillion trillion unique addresses, which solves the limited address space problem. The reason that the new generation of Internet protocol is named as Ipv6 instead of Ipv5 is that Ipv5 has already been defined …show more content…

However, upgrading Ipv4 devices to Ipv6 devices is costly. Without the general customer demand of Ipv6, the Internet service providers will not invest money in Ipv6 development and implementation.
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.
II. BACKGROUND
A. IPv6 address structure
IPv6 address space is composed of 128 bits IP addresses. A typical IPv6 address can be broken down into 8 groups of 16 bits each, separated by colons, written in hex decimal numbers. Figure 1 shows an example of a Ipv6 address. For simplicity, two continuous colons can be used to replace the zero block in between, which can only be adopted once in one Ipv6 address. Also, the leading zeros can be omitted without introducing any confusion.

B. IPv6 address scope
According to the scope of addresses, Ipv6 addresses are classified into two types, global IPv6 addresses and link local addresses. The global address is unique and reachable all over the Internet, similar to the public address in Ipv4. The link local address is not routable and only used in the local network, set by default when Ipv6 function is enabled, similar to the MAC address in Ipv4. It always starts with FF80, followed by 48-bit

Get Access