IPv6 is the most recent version of the Internet Protocol (IP) . It was developed by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) to deal with the long-anticipated problem of IPv4 address exhaustion and was intended to replace IPv4. IPv6 is an Internet Layer protocol for packet-switched internetworking and provides end-to-end datagram transmission across multiple IP networks, closely adhering to the design principles developed in the previous version of the protocol, IPv4.
IPv6 uses a 128-bit alphanumeric value to identify an endpoint device in an IPv6 network. This is a significant increase from the 32-bit address space used by IPv4, which was running out of potential addresses. The number of potential IPv6 addresses has been calculated to be over 340 undecillion, which means that we will never run out of IP addresses again.
IPv6 has several advantages over IPv4, including:
- Reliability: IPv6 includes built-in error checking and can automatically detect and recover from errors.
- Security: IPv6 includes built-in encryption and authentication features, making it more secure than IPv4.
- Faster Speeds: IPv6 supports multicast rather than broadcast, which means that data can be sent to multiple devices simultaneously, resulting in faster speeds.
Although IPv6 has been around for almost 10 years, it is still not widely deployed and supported. However, adoption rates are increasing rapidly, and all modern computers and mobile phones support both IPv4 and IPv6.
