IPv6 (Internet Protocol version 6) is an interesting topic for IT students. Some say that if you know IPv6 (even just a small information about it), you are considered as a professional or smart. A lot of people are amazed (even IT students) if they heard IPv6. Why is that so? It is because, it’s not used that often when making some configuration – hardware. So, why are we going to talk about IPv6 while in fact it’s not that useful? Is it? Let’s find out…
We are aware that all devices like computers need an IP addresses in order to communicate. With the billions of numbers of computers nowadays (even mobile devices are connected to the internet), we need more IP addresses that IPv4 cannot accommodate. Now tell me, isn’t it important?
Let me give you a little point – to – ponder before digging deeply into IPv6. This is taken from Wikipedia.com:
IPv6 (Internet Protocol version 6) is a version of the Internet Protocol (IP) developed by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) that is intended to succeed IPv4 as the dominant communications protocol used for Internet traffic. It was developed to deal with the long-anticipated IPv4 address exhaustion by implementing a new address system with a greatly increased number of possible addresses.
Deployment of IPv6 is accelerating, with a World IPv6 Launch having taken place on 6 June 2012, in which major internet service providers, especially in countries that had been lagging in IPv6 adoption, deployed IPv6 addresses to portions of their users. It was estimated that the world launch resulted in an estimated 1% of all Internet users operating from an IPv6 address.
Another point is from ipv6.com:
IPv6 or Internet Protocol Version 6 is the next generation protocol for the Internet. It’s designed to provide several advantages over current Internet Protocol Version 4 (or IPv4).
Both IPv6 and IPv4 define network layer protocol i.e., how data is sent from one computer to another computer over packet-switched networks such as the Internet.
IPv6 is about an address with a 128 bits long (a big number that can accommodate a big number of addresses we need in the near future). Dividing this number of bits into two making two 64 bits. The first 64 is for the Network address and the other one for the Host ID. Network address and Host ID of IPv6 has the same meaning with that of IPv4.
This 128 bits is broken down into eight(8) groups of 16 bits. Refer to the example below:
All in all, if you will count the number of zeros, there are 128 of them grouped into 8 groups. And each group separated by zeros is 16 bits long.
The above example is in binary and IPv6 is written in Hexadecimal. Let us then convert binary to hexadecimal. To start with, the eight groups will then be divided into nibble (4 bits) each. Refer below:
0000 0000 0000 0000 . 0000 0000 0000 0000 ……………(so on…)
This is one group of 16 bits and divided into nibble or 4 bits. If you can notice, there is a point or a period in every after each group (8 bits). This will serve as a guide that they are separated. For IPv6 on the other hand, colon (:) will serve as the separator.
0000 0000 0000 0000 . 0000 0000 0000 0000 ……………(so on…), when converted into hexadecimal, the IPv6 would probably looks like this:
Do you enjoy the post? Love computations?, know more about IPv6 for our next topic… the IPv6 network address. Have a nice day!
Monday, June 25, 2012
Tuesday, June 26,2012