Introduction to IPv6

IPv6 is the next and updated version of IPv4. The future addressing system of Internet. It has some very basic differences with IPv4. Let’s see what they are…

1. The first change is the address space. IPv4 is 32 bit and IPv6 is 128 bit.
2. As the subnet mask will be very difficult to calculate, we can always use it with CIDR notation everywhere.
3. It will be representing as follows with 8 slots and each slot contains 4 digits, each digit represents 4 bits of Hexadecimal value, separated with colon (:) not dot (.).
   
   xxxx : xxxx : xxxx : xxxx : xxxx : xxxx : xxxx : xxxx
   
   
4. IPv6 eliminates the need for DHCP server configuration. Because the IPv6 autoconfiguration feature automatically configures interface addresses and default routes for you. In stateless autoconfiguration, IPv6 takes the MAC address of the machine and a network prefix provided by a local router and combines these two addresses to create a new, which is a unique IPv6 address.
5. To make non-interrupted migration of IPv4 to IPv6 it supports concurrent and harmless parallel configurations on the same device. As a result you can run both IPv4 and IPv6 applications on same device.
6. Domain Name System (DNS) supports AAAA addresses and a new domain for reverse lookups, which is IP6.ARPA. The DNS retrieves IPv6 information. Where IPv4 supports A addresses/ A records.
7. The testing tools: ping, traceroute, netstat, nslookup already supports IPv6.

So these are the basic idea of IPv6. There are lots of more features of IPv6. We will discuss those in later posts.