Almost all electronic devices can be connected to the Internet these days. So, the IP addressing system needs to be able to accommodate that many devices.
IPv6 has scalability in the network space to handle the outpouring devices being registered on the internet by providing lightweight data transport.
IPv6 gives an advantage to the Internet-of-things devices as it has stateless address auto-configuration present. It had led to the successful growth in IoT because of the configuration facility that it offers. So, exactly how does IPv6 work?”
Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) is an Internet Protocol that helps in routing traffic across the internet. It also resolves the problem of IPv4 address exhaustion.
IPv6 delivers packets from a source computer to a destination computer. IPv4 was developed in the 1980s when the internet was in infancy, where it wasn’t predicted the number of addresses that the internet will foresee.
IPv4 does not support enough addresses to connect all the devices being operated in the world.
- It only supports 4.3 billion addresses.
- IPv4 address space is poorly allocated, with only 14% of all available addresses in use.
IPv6 has replaced IPv4 which was developed by Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) in December 1998 as an up-gradation to the previous version. It connects more devices than the address spaces available with IPv4.
With the availability of Ipv6, all the devices can be internally connected without any interruption. There are many benefits that IPv6 offers other than a larger addressing space over IPv4.
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It limits the expansion of routing tables and makes them more efficient by permitting hierarchical address allocation. It facilitates route aggregation across the internet.
For allocating the path, it uses a particular protocol, the Maximum Transmission Unit (MTU).
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IPv6 uses multicast addressing, which is expanded over the internet and simplifies the delivery process by providing additional optimization. It also gives device mobility and covers the configuration aspects in the protocol designing.
It also handles the end to end connectivity, which enables error detection by providing more transport layers.
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IPv6 supports broadcast, where it allows in-depth packet flows. It provides efficient data flow between multimedia streams. It also features a new field, named Flow Label, which recognizes packets belonging to the same flow.
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The resources are efficiently allocated to accommodate any other web addresses. After the router sends the prefix of the local link, the host generates its own IP addresses by affixing its link address which is converted into a 64-bit format, to the 64 bits of the local link prefix. This provides a faster communication medium.
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IPv6 avoids triangular routing, which is a form of the path which sends a connection to a proxy system before transferring to the destination. This allows entire subnets to move to a new router point without any renumbering.
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The IPv6 routing is to be enabled according to the system it has been run on. When the data is entered manually, the long IP addresses have to be typed.
The addresses then would have to be remembered, because most IP addresses are very long, which involve letters and numbers.
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IPv4 addresses had a short length, which was easy to lay on the topology drawing. With the IPv6 protocol, it becomes complicated to fit the prefixes. The text is barely legible in the case of IPv6.
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Business organizations are supposed to enhance their networking devices as they aren’t designed for IPv6 adoption. This is not limited to the entities that regularly update their devices.
Many businesses must bring an expert opinion. i.e., a consultant to make the transformation as easy as possible as reliable software may need a costly upgrade
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Assigning new IP addresses manually is a complicated task, as Local Network Management involves assigning IP addresses to specific devices.
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During the transition from IPv4 to IPv6 confusion may persist due to lack of backward compatibility. Internet service providers have to pay to support IPv6 to shuffle between different protocols thoroughly.
Many organizations still use IPv4 operated devices while they want to grow their network using IPv6, but it lacks backward compatibility for IPv4.
There are three main options available for transferring to IPv6 from the existing network infrastructure. These options will apex the merits of stateful translation and the technical overview of the scenarios.
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The network hardware runs IPv4 and IPv6 together. Here, the computers, routers, and switches run both protocols though IPv6 is the preferred protocol.
Both TCP/IP are enabled on the wide-area network (WAN) routers, followed by the firewalls, data-center routers, and finally the desktop access routers. The advantage that this approach carries is that it is supported by major network vendors.
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One protocol is tunneled inside the other by abridging the IPv6 packets in IPv4 packets and vice versa. It gives the advantage of working on the new protocol without disturbing the old protocol and providing connectivity to the users.
Though, one main disadvantage of these options is that the users of the new protocol cannot communicate with the users of the old protocol without dual-stack hosts.
CONCLUSION:
Websites will be forced to go through another gateway that is engineered to run on IPv6, just to communicate with the devices still using IPv4.
It is necessary for IPv6 to have backward compatibility with IPv4 to resolve the shortage of Internet addresses.
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