How is IPv6 better than IPv4 ?

[Duggars]

Hello every one I am a an IT students and doing my graduation from a good institute . But my syllabus of all the semesters cover mostly the software part and I am not much interested in programming and all that stuff , but I look my future in Networking. I had a subject related to it but the teacher who taught that subject was not that good , so I decided to do a self study on the subject .I know that there are two versions of IP address,IPv4 and IPv6, but do not know how is the latter better than the former . I think such topics are understood very well in discussions , so I have typed my question in this forum.

[teenQ]

Yes , lots of IT prefer networking student choose over programming and development. So it is advisable for you to take help from your senior colleague in so that they can assist you in solving your query. But you can use the internet as well as you said you like to study while discussing on your favorite topic. Before discussing the demerits of IPv4 , let me tell you about the IP protocol. It stands for Internet protocol which is a stateless protocol i.e it does not require any request for connection as it does in TCP. On the other hand it is not a reliable protocol i.e it does not gives you any assurance that your packet will reach the intended address safe and sound. So for that reason of unreliability it is lower level protocol it and has to depend on upper level protocols such as TCP , UDP etc . These protocol are stateful and reliable and perform 3 way handshaking for connection establishment and 4 way hand shaking for for connection termination. IP protocols has two versions : IPv4 and IPv6 , due to limited address spacing IPv6 was introduced.

[Amie]

There was a rapid exhaustion of address space in the fourth version of IP protocol, many conservative methods were followed to resolve it, but it did not work for a long time.This triggered some new activity among the Internet Engineering task force . They decided to change the whole protocol rather than making alterations in the older version of the IP protocol. Thus the newer version of IP protocol was introduced with the name IPv6 in 1995. It eventually provided more addressing than IPv4.

[HiSpeed]

The addressing in the version 4 was restricted upto 32 bits. A you see the IP address represented in the IPv4 you will be able to see the addressing is divided into four segments. Each segment is called and octet where as each octet occupies 8 bits. Thus 4 such octets constitute a 32 bit address. On the contrary to this, IPv6 was introduces with the address space of 128 bits . It will contain 16 such octets. So it provides flexibility in addressing .

[addie]

Moreover there will be a huge requirement need for address spacing in the developing countries like China and India , so IANA (Internet Assigned Numbers Authority) allocation of pool of addresses will be insufficient within a decade.The Version 6 IP addresses are either stateless or stateful. If stateful the address is assigned by the DHCP server, but if it is stateless the IP address is allocated automatically once the router is discovered .The IP address in the newer versions are also Link-local where the establishment of connection is restricted only to the subnet link only or the neighbors of the link, if the address begins with FEC0 then the datagram is discarded. If the IP address is Site local then the connection is restricted to a site in any organization. The IPv6 is much more quicker and it is also easy to scale, while IPv4 is not .

[Big Fish]

The header format in the IPv6 is improvised so that limitations of header overheads were overcome this time. It has added an extended header that appears after the actual IP header which helps in reducing the overheads by adding the non essential and non required part to the the extended header rather than the actual header. The larger address space in this protocol is not introduced for mere increase in address increment but also to implement multiple levels of sub netting and thus the address can be assigned to the individual sub nets that are present in any organization. This all were not present in IPv4.