Ipv4 And Ipv6 Protocol

1. Introduction

When TCP/IP was created in 70’s, the Internet began to run on it until today. In 1981, since IPv4 (Internet Protocol Version 4) was introduced; it has served the Internet from a small research group only between some universities to a global network all over the world for over thirty years. However, as the dramatically growing number of computers and other network devices in the world, the IP addresses are nearly exhausted because of the IPv4 drawbacks, so demanding requirements of more IP address and security need a new protocol to handle these issues. To eliminate these mentioned problems, a new version of the Internet protocol (IPv6) was introduced in 1990s. For main reason, this new network layer protocol was designed to increase the IP address size from 32bits to 128 bits, which could supply nearly unlimited IP address to all services and devices. In addition, comparing with IPv4, IPv6 protocol brings more safe and secure communications and data transfers. The new features, possibilities and improvements of IPv6 protocol would extremely enhance the performance of today’s network.

Although IPv6 protocol has many advantages, implementations and applications of IPv6 protocol in real network are still slow and difficult. Because of the size of global network, the transition from IPv4 to IPv6 cannot be instant. That means during the migration between these two protocols, there would appear several of issues and problems. Moreover, vendors, ISPs and related companies are waiting for an appropriate market opportunity, because most of them believed that there is no rush to join the crowd touting to be the first one to deploy the IPv6 protocol. In Canada, today, there are more than twenty five ISPs have started to sup...

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...09) addresses. That is enough for many trillions of addresses to be assigned to every human being on the planet. Moreover, these address bits are divided between the network prefix and the host identifier portions of the address. The network prefix designates the network upon which the host bearing the address resides. The host identifier identifies the node or interface within the network upon which it resides. The network prefix may change while the host identifier can remain static. The static host identifier allows a device to maintain a consistent identity despite its location in a network. This enormous number of addresses allows for end-to-end communication between devices with globally unique IP addresses and can better support the delivery of peer-to-peer services with data-rich content such as voice and video. Chapter 3 describes IPv6 addressing in detail.