IPV6: New Protocol of the Internet

Official logo of IPV6

Now the internet is not just limited to having addresses allowed by IPV4, the internet protocol version that has been the primary protocol of the internet for the long time. IPV6 is officially launched now on World IPV6 launch day june 6, 2012 organised by internet society. Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4) is the fourth revision in the development of the Internet Protocol (IP) and the first version of the protocol to be widely deployed. Together with IPv6, it is at the core of standards-based internetworking methods of the Internet. As of 2012 IPv4 is still the most widely deployed Internet Layer protocol. IPv4 uses 32-bit (four-byte) addresses, which limits the address space to 4294967296 (232) addresses. Addresses were assigned to users, and the number of unassigned addresses decreased. IPv4 address exhaustion occurred on February 3, 2011. It had been significantly delayed by address changes such as classful network design, Classless Inter-Domain Routing, and network address translation (NAT). This limitation of IPv4 stimulated the development of IPv6 in the 1990s, which has been in commercial deployment since 2006. Since the 1980s, it was apparent that the pool of available IPv4 addresses was being depleted at a rate that was not initially anticipated in the original design of the network address system. The threat of exhaustion was the motivation for remedial technologies, such as classful networks, Classless InterDomain Routing (CIDR) methods, and network address translation (NAT). Eventually, IPv6 was created, which has many more addresses available. Several market forces accelerated IPv4 address exhaustion: Rapidly growing number of Internet users

Always-on devices ADSL modems, cable modems Mobile devices laptop computers, PDAs, mobile phones

Some technologies mitigated IPv4 address exhaustion: Network address translation (NAT) is a technology that allows a private network to use one public IP address. It permits private addresses in the private network. Use of private networks Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) Name-based virtual hosting of web sites Tighter control by regional Internet registries over the allocation of addresses to local Internet registries Network renumbering to reclaim large blocks of address space allocated in the early days of the Internet

The accepted and standard solution is to use Internet Protocol Version 6. The address size was increased in IPv6 to 128 bits, providing a vastly increased address space that also allows improved route aggregation across the Internet and offers large subnetwork allocations of a minimum of 264 host addresses to end-users. June 6, 2012 marks the official launch of IPv6, the new Internet Protocol that's permanently being deployed by ISPs in more than 100 countries, home router equipment manufacturers and leading websites like Google, Facebook, YouTube and Yahoo. The launch arrives after the last blocks of the IPv4 addresses were assigned to the Regional Internet Registries in February 2011. That means there is no remaining IPv4 address space to be distributed in the Asia Pacific region. Even more, IPv4 address space is expected to run out in Europe this year, in the U.S. next year, and in Latin America and Africa in 2014. World IPv6 Launch is organized by the Internet Society as "part of its mission to ensure that the Internet remains open and accessible for everyone -- including the other five billion people not yet connected to the Internet."

Hem Sharma Acharya 2009se13