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 TYPE CLASS Domain name AAAA (28) Internet (1)

TTL
RDATA

Time to live in seconds

String form of the IPV6 address as described in RFC 3513

RDLENGTH Length of RDATA field

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