• IPv6

  • IPv4

What Is IPv6?

Origin

IP is the core protocol of the Internet. The IP in use today (i.e. IPV4) was designed in the late 1970s. The Internet has grown so rapidly over the decades that by February 2011, IPV4 had run out of addresses and ISPs could no longer apply for new blocks of IP addresses. The fundamental solution to IP address exhaustion is to adopt a new version of IP with a larger address space, namely IPv6.

Composition

An IPv6 datagram consists of two main parts, the header and the payload that follows it. The payload is allowed to have zero or more extended headers, followed by the data portion. Note, however, that all extension headers are not part of the header of an IPv6 datagram.

Differences from IPv4

1. IPv6 increases the address space from 32 bits in IPv4 to 4 times that of IPv4, i.e., to 128 bits, making the address space twice as large. This large address space will not be used up in the foreseeable future.

2. Extended address hierarchy. IPV6 can be divided into more hierarchies because of the large address space.

3. Flexible header formats. IPVv6 datagram headers are not compatible with IPv4, and IPV6 defines a number of optional extended headers that not only provide more functionality than IPv4, but also improve router processing efficiency.

4. IPV6 allows datagrams to contain control information with options, so new options can be included. However, the header length of IPv6 is fixed.

5. Allow protocols to continue to expand. This is important because technology is always evolving (e.g., updates to network hardware) and new applications are still emerging. But we know that the functionality of IPv4 is fixed.

6. It supports plug-and-play (i.e., automatic configuration). Therefore, IPv6 does not require the use of DHCP.

7. Pre-allocation of resources is supported. IPv6 supports applications such as real-time video that require a guaranteed amount of bandwidth and latency.

8. IPV6 headers are now 8-byte aligned (i.e. the header length must be an integer multiple of 8 bytes). The original IP4 header is 4-byte aligned.

LightNode provides IPv6. If you need IPv6, then you can come to us.