23 Facts About IPv6

IPv6 was developed by the Internet Engineering Task Force to deal with the long-anticipated problem of IPv4 address exhaustion, and is intended to replace IPv4.

In December 1998, IPv6 became a Draft Standard for the IETF, which subsequently ratified it as an Internet Standard on 14 July 2017.

IPv6 uses 128-bit addresses, theoretically allowing 2, or approximately 3.

IPv6 provides other technical benefits in addition to a larger addressing space.

IPv6 addresses are represented as eight groups of four hexadecimal digits each, separated by colons.

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IPv6 is an Internet Layer protocol for packet-switched internetworking and provides end-to-end datagram transmission across multiple IP networks, closely adhering to the design principles developed in the previous version of the protocol, Internet Protocol Version 4 .

IPv6 specifies a new packet format, designed to minimize packet header processing by routers.

The standard size of a subnet in IPv6 is 2 addresses, about four billion times the size of the entire IPv4 address space.

IPv6 multicast addressing has features and protocols in common with IPv4 multicast, but provides changes and improvements by eliminating the need for certain protocols.

IPv6 provides for new multicast implementations, including embedding rendezvous point addresses in an IPv6 multicast group address, which simplifies the deployment of inter-domain solutions.

Unicast address assignments by a local Internet registry for IPv6 have at least a 64-bit routing prefix, yielding the smallest subnet size available in IPv6 .

The design of IPv6 intended to re-emphasize the end-to-end principle of network design that was originally conceived during the establishment of the early Internet by rendering network address translation obsolete.

Internet Protocol Security was originally developed for IPv6, but found widespread deployment first in IPv4, for which it was re-engineered.

Integrity protection for the data that is encapsulated in the IPv6 packet is assumed to be assured by both the link layer or error detection in higher-layer protocols, namely the Transmission Control Protocol and the User Datagram Protocol on the transport layer.

IPv6 hosts are required either to perform path MTU discovery, perform end-to-end fragmentation, or send packets no larger than the default maximum transmission unit, which is 1280 octets.

Unlike mobile IPv4, mobile IPv6 avoids triangular routing and is therefore as efficient as native IPv6.

All interfaces of IPv6 hosts require a link-local address, which have the prefix.

IPv6 uses a new mechanism for mapping IP addresses to link-layer addresses, because it does not support the broadcast addressing method, on which the functionality of the Address Resolution Protocol in IPv4 is based.

Once a unique link-local address is established, the IPv6 host determines whether the LAN is connected on this link to any router interface that supports IPv6.

An alternate record type was used in early DNS implementations for IPv6, designed to facilitate network renumbering, the A6 records for the forward lookup and a number of other innovations such as bit-string labels and DNAME records.

Shadow networks have occurred on business networks in which enterprises are replacing Windows XP systems that do not have an IPv6 stack enabled by default, with Windows 7 systems, that do.

The specification mandated IPv6 operation according to the 3GPP Release 8 Specifications, and deprecated IPv4 as an optional capability.

Internet backbone transit networks offering IPv6 support existed in every country globally, except in parts of Africa, the Middle East and China.