IPv6

Internet Protocol Version 6

Overview

What is Ipv6?
Features
Addressing
IPv6 Packets
IPv6 and Domain Name System

Why IPv6?
In 1991, four things worried the network
operators:
Router memory exhaustion due to the number of
routes.
The Network Information Centers (NICs) were
running out of Class B IPv4 addresses to assign to
new networks.
Address exhaustion was forecasted within 10-15
years.
Network administration was expensive, error prone
and largely manual due to the lack of autoconfiguration capabilities.

What is IPv6?
Network layer protocol for packet switched
internet works.
Conservative extension of IPv4.
Virtually unlimited IP address possible.
(Major

advantage over IPv4)

Originally called as IP Next Generation

(IPng).

Features

Larger address space

Stateless auto configuration of host.
Multicast
Network Layer Security. (encryption and authentication, is an
integral part of base protocol)

Mobility
Supports quality of service (QoS)
parameters for realtime audio and video.

Addressing :: Whats New?

Addresses are 128 bit long versus 32 bit in
IPv4
Able to support 2128 (about 3.41038)
addresses, for each of the roughly 6.5
billion people alive today.
In most of the cases NAT (Network
address translation) is not required.
Makes large networks simpler, by avoiding
the need for complex sub netting schemes

Addressing :: Notation
Written as eight group of four hexadecimal numbers.
For example,
2027:0db8:8da3:08d3:1319:8a2e:0370:7322 is a valid
IPv6 address.
If one or more four-digit group(s) is 0000, the zeros may
be omitted and replaced with two colons(::)
A sequence of 4 bytes at the end of an IPv6 address can
also be written in decimal, using dots as separators.
In a URL the IPv6-Address is enclosed in brackets.
Example: http://[2001:0db8:0:0::1428:57ab]/

Addressing :: Drawback
Some Bandwidth overhead over IPv4,
which may hurt regions where bandwidth
is limited
Address are harder to memorize as
compared to IPv4 addresses.

IPv6 Packet
Two main parts: Header and Payload
Header is in first 40Bytes
The payload can be up to 64KB in size in
standard mode, or larger with a "jumbo
payload" option.

IPv6 and DNS

Represented in DNS as quad-A records
(AAAA), for forward lookups.
Reverse lookup take place under ip6.arpa
AAAA record fields
NAME

Domain name

TYPE

AAAA (28)

CLASS

Internet (1)

TTL

Time to live in seconds

RDLENGTH Length of RDATA field

RDATA

String form of the IPV6 address as described in RFC 3513

Refrences
http://www.ipv6.org
http://www.ipv6forum.com/ - A forum to
discuss Ipv6 development, also keeps a
time track of when will IPv4 addresses
exhaust.
http://playground.sun.com/ipv6/ipngmain.html