CONTENTS Introduction Holes in IPV4 Technique to reduce Address shortage in IPV4 IPV6 Background Features of IPV6 Address space

and notation PV6 header IPV6 address representation IPV6 address management PV6 address transition strategies Routing in IPV6 Types of message in IPV6 IPV6 readiness Major milestone Conclusion References

Internet Protocol Version 6(IPv6) is a version of the Internet Protocol that isdesigned to succeed Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4), the first publicly usedInternet Protocol in operation since 1981. IPv6 is an Internet Layer protocol for packet-switched internetworking. The main driving force for the redesign of Internet Protocol was the foreseeable IPv4 address exhaustion. IPv6 was developed by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), and is described in Internetstandard document RFC 2460, published in December 1998. IPv6 has a vastly larger address space than IPv4. This results from the use of a128-bit address, whereas IPv4 uses only 32 bits. The new address space thussupports 2 128(about 3.41038) addresses. This expansion provides flexibility inallocating addresses and routing traffic and eliminates the primary need for network address translation (NAT), which gained widespread deployment as aneffort to alleviate IPv4 address exhaustion. IPv6 also implements many other new features. It simplifies aspects of addressassignment (stateless address autoconfiguration) and network renumbering (prefixand router announcements) when changing Internet connectivity providers. TheIPv6 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 formingthe host identifier from Link Layer media addressing information (MACaddress). Network security is also integrated into the design of the IPv6 architecture, and theIPv6 specification mandates support for IPsec as a fundamental interoperabilityrequirement. For deployment, IPv6 is largely incompatible with IPv4 at the packet level, andtranslation services have practical issues that make them controversial. IPv6 andIPv4 are therefore treated as almost entirely separate networks with devices havingtwo separate protocol stacks if they need to access both networks, with tunnelingof IPv6 on IPv4 and vice versa. In December 2008, despite marking its 10thanniversary as a Standards Track protocol, IPv6 was only in its infancy in terms of general worldwide deployment.

Holes in v4 Address Space Each pixel represents a /24 Routing tables were used to generate yellow portions of the table routableaddresses Incomplete view of the entire Internet Packet traces were used to generate black portions of the table source/destinationaddresses Raises more questions than it answers Class As allocated to companies, etc. used for internal routing only (?) Class B & C allocation from lowest to highest Reserved address space Unallocated space Holes in v4 Address Space

Techniques to reduce address shortage in IPv4 1 Subnetting 2 Classless Inter Domain Routing (CIDR)