Internet Protocol version 6\u00c2\u00a0(IPv6) is the most recent version of the\u00c2\u00a0Internet Protocol\u00c2\u00a0(IP), the\u00c2\u00a0communications protocol\u00c2\u00a0that provides an identification and location system for computers on networks and routes traffic across the\u00c2\u00a0Internet. IPv6 was developed by the\u00c2\u00a0Internet Engineering Task Force\u00c2\u00a0(IETF) to deal with the long-anticipated problem of\u00c2\u00a0IPv4 address exhaustion. IPv6 is intended to replace\u00c2\u00a0IPv4.\u00c2\u00a0In December 1998, IPv6 became a Draft Standard for the IETF,\u00c2\u00a0who subsequently ratified it as an\u00c2\u00a0Internet Standard\u00c2\u00a0on 14 July 2017.<\/p>\n
Devices on the Internet are assigned a unique\u00c2\u00a0IP address\u00c2\u00a0for identification and location definition. With the rapid growth of the Internet after commercialization in the 1990s, it became evident that far more addresses would be needed to connect devices than the IPv4 address space had available. By 1998, the IETF had formalized the successor protocol. IPv6 uses a 128-bit address, theoretically allowing 2128<\/sup>, or approximately\u00c2\u00a03.4\u00c3\u20141038<\/sup><\/span>\u00c2\u00a0addresses. The actual number is slightly smaller, as multiple ranges are reserved for special use or completely excluded from use. The two protocols are not designed to be\u00c2\u00a0interoperable, and thus direct communication between them is impossible, complicating the move to IPv6. However, several\u00c2\u00a0transition mechanisms\u00c2\u00a0have been devised to rectify this.<\/p>\n IPv6 provides other technical benefits in addition to a larger addressing space. In particular, it permits hierarchical address allocation methods that facilitate\u00c2\u00a0route aggregation\u00c2\u00a0across the Internet, and thus limit the expansion of\u00c2\u00a0routing tables. The use of multicast addressing is expanded and simplified, and provides additional optimization for the delivery of services. Device mobility, security, and configuration aspects have been considered in the design of the protocol.<\/p>\n IPv6 is an\u00c2\u00a0Internet Layer\u00c2\u00a0protocol for\u00c2\u00a0packet-switched\u00c2\u00a0internetworking\u00c2\u00a0and provides end-to-end\u00c2\u00a0datagram\u00c2\u00a0transmission across multiple IP networks, closely adhering to the design principles developed in the previous version of the protocol,\u00c2\u00a0Internet Protocol Version 4\u00c2\u00a0(IPv4).<\/p>\n In addition to offering more addresses, IPv6 also implements features not present in IPv4. It simplifies aspects of address configuration, network renumbering, and router announcements when changing network connectivity providers. It simplifies processing of packets in routers by placing the responsibility for packet fragmentation into the end points. The IPv6\u00c2\u00a0subnet\u00c2\u00a0size is standardized by fixing the size of the host identifier portion of an address to 64 bits.<\/p>\n The addressing architecture of IPv6 is defined in\u00c2\u00a0RFC\u00c2\u00a04291\u00c2\u00a0and allows three different types of transmission:\u00c2\u00a0unicast,\u00c2\u00a0anycast\u00c2\u00a0and\u00c2\u00a0multicast.<\/p>\n Internet Protocol Version 4\u00c2\u00a0(IPv4) was the first publicly used version of the\u00c2\u00a0Internet Protocol. IPv4 was developed as a research project by the\u00c2\u00a0Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency\u00c2\u00a0(DARPA), a\u00c2\u00a0United States Department of Defense\u00c2\u00a0agency, before becoming the foundation for the\u00c2\u00a0Internet\u00c2\u00a0and the\u00c2\u00a0World Wide Web. IPv4 includes an addressing system that uses numerical identifiers consisting of 32 bits. These addresses are typically displayed in\u00c2\u00a0quad-dotted notation\u00c2\u00a0as decimal values of four octets, each in the range 0 to 255, or 8 bits per number. Thus, IPv4 provides an addressing capability of 232<\/sup>\u00c2\u00a0or approximately 4.3 billion addresses. Address exhaustion was not initially a concern in IPv4 as this version was originally presumed to be a test of DARPA’s networking concepts.\u00c2\u00a0During the first decade of operation of the Internet, it became apparent that methods had to be developed to conserve address space. In the early 1990s, even after the redesign of the addressing system using a\u00c2\u00a0classless network\u00c2\u00a0model, it became clear that this would not suffice to prevent\u00c2\u00a0IPv4 address exhaustion, and that further changes to the Internet infrastructure were needed.<\/p>\n The last unassigned top-level address blocks of 16 million IPv4 addresses were allocated in February 2011 by the\u00c2\u00a0Internet Assigned Numbers Authority\u00c2\u00a0(IANA) to the five\u00c2\u00a0regional Internet registries\u00c2\u00a0(RIRs). However, each RIR still has available address pools and is expected to continue with standard address allocation policies until one \/8\u00c2\u00a0Classless Inter-Domain Routing\u00c2\u00a0(CIDR) block remains. After that, only blocks of 1024 addresses (\/22) will be provided from the RIRs to a\u00c2\u00a0local Internet registry\u00c2\u00a0(LIR). As of September 2015, all of\u00c2\u00a0Asia-Pacific Network Information Centre\u00c2\u00a0(APNIC), the\u00c2\u00a0R\u00c3\u00a9seaux IP Europ\u00c3\u00a9ens Network Coordination Centre\u00c2\u00a0(RIPE_NCC),\u00c2\u00a0Latin America and Caribbean Network Information Centre\u00c2\u00a0(LACNIC), and\u00c2\u00a0American Registry for Internet Numbers\u00c2\u00a0(ARIN) have reached this stage.\u00c2\u00a0This leaves\u00c2\u00a0African Network Information Center\u00c2\u00a0(AFRINIC) as the sole regional internet registry that is still using the normal protocol for distributing IPv4 addresses. As of November 2018, AFRINIC’s minimum allocation is \/22 or 1024 IPv4 addresses. A\u00c2\u00a0LIR\u00c2\u00a0may receive additional allocation when about 80% of all the address space has been utilized.<\/p>\n RIPE NCC announced that it had fully run out of IPv4 addresses on 25 November 2019, and called for greater progress on the adoption of IPv6.<\/p>\n It is widely expected that the Internet will use IPv4 alongside IPv6 for the foreseeable future.<\/p>\n By 2011, all major operating systems in use on personal computers and server systems had production-quality IPv6 implementations. Cellular telephone systems presented a large deployment field for Internet Protocol devices as mobile telephone service made the transition from\u00c2\u00a03G\u00c2\u00a0to\u00c2\u00a04G\u00c2\u00a0technologies, in which voice is provisioned as a\u00c2\u00a0voice over IP\u00c2\u00a0(VoIP) service that would leverage IPv6 enhancements. In 2009, the US cellular operator\u00c2\u00a0Verizon\u00c2\u00a0released technical specifications for devices to operate on its “next-generation” networks.\u00c2\u00a0The specification mandated IPv6 operation according to the\u00c2\u00a03GPP Release 8 Specifications (March 2009)<\/i>, and deprecated IPv4 as an optional capability.<\/p>\n The deployment of IPv6 in the\u00c2\u00a0Internet backbone\u00c2\u00a0continued. In 2018 only 25.3% of the about 54,000 autonomous systems advertised both IPv4 and IPv6 prefixes in the global\u00c2\u00a0Border Gateway Protocol\u00c2\u00a0(BGP) routing database. A further 243 networks advertised only an IPv6 prefix. Internet backbone transit networks offering IPv6 support existed in every country globally, except in parts of\u00c2\u00a0Africa, the\u00c2\u00a0Middle East\u00c2\u00a0and China.\u00c2\u00a0By mid-2018 some major European\u00c2\u00a0broadband\u00c2\u00a0ISPs had deployed IPv6 for the majority of their customers.\u00c2\u00a0British Sky Broadcasting\u00c2\u00a0provided over 86% of its customers with IPv6,\u00c2\u00a0Deutsche Telekom\u00c2\u00a0had 56% deployment of IPv6,\u00c2\u00a0XS4ALL\u00c2\u00a0in the Netherlands had 73% deployment and in Belgium the broadband ISPs\u00c2\u00a0VOO\u00c2\u00a0and\u00c2\u00a0Telenet\u00c2\u00a0had 73% and 63% IPv6 deployment respectively.\u00c2\u00a0In the United States the broadband ISP\u00c2\u00a0Comcast\u00c2\u00a0had an IPv6 deployment of about 66%. In 2018 Comcast reported an estimated 36.1 million IPv6 users, while\u00c2\u00a0AT&T\u00c2\u00a0reported 22.3 million IPv6 users.<\/p>\n The above is a brief about\u00c2\u00a0IPv6. Watch this space for more updates on the latest Trends in Technology.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Internet Protocol version 6\u00c2\u00a0(IPv6) is<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1243,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[745,744,7],"tags":[289,746,18],"class_list":["post-1239","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-internet-protocol","category-ipv6","category-techtrends","tag-coffeescript","tag-internet-protocol","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.amt.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1239","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.amt.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.amt.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.amt.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.amt.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1239"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blog.amt.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1239\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1240,"href":"https:\/\/blog.amt.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1239\/revisions\/1240"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.amt.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1243"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.amt.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1239"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.amt.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1239"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.amt.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1239"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}