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What is IPv6?
John Savill
March 8, 1999
1 Min Read
A. IPv6 is the next verions of the Internet Protocol, version 6.0hence IPv6.
Current computers use IP version 4.0 which despite being created in themid-1970's has done very well however it has reached its limit and is about torun out of addresses and is not the most bandwidth friendly protocol so itstime for an upgrade.
Below are the 4 main reasons that IP version 4.0 needs an upgrade:
Address space limitation - Basically there are not many IP addresses leftand with everything from watches having IP addresses we need more
Performance - IP has a very strict header format which can waste a greatdeal of bandwidth
Security - The next version of IP has excellent security measures which upto now have had to be handled by higher layers
Autoconfigure - IP configuration is quite complex and which DHCP moves toimprove this the next version allows a computer to just plug into the networkand go
Current IP addresses consist of 32 bits, represented as 4 bytes, dotted-quadformat, e.g. 200.200.200.202. IP version 6 uses 128 bits for addresses!
IPv6 is defined in the following RFC's (Request for Comments)
RFC 1287 - Towards the Future InternetArchitecture
RFC 1454 - Comparison of Proposals for NextVersion of IP
RFC 2373 - IPv6 Addressing Architecture
RFC 2374 - IPv6 Global Unicast Address Format
RFC 2460 - IPv6 Specification
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