jessica
07-27-2008, 11:56 AM
I guess we will need more IPs.
Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) is an Internet Layer protocol for packet switched internetworks. It is designated as the successor of IPv4, the first and still dominant version of the Internet Protocol, for general use on the Internet.
The main change brought by IPv6 is a much larger address space that allows greater flexibility in allocating addresses and routing traffic. The extended address length eliminates the need to use network address translation to avoid address exhaustion, and also simplifies aspects of address assignment and renumbering when changing Internet connectivity providers.
It is common to see examples that attempt to show that the IPv6 address space is extremely large. For example, IPv6 supports 2128 (about 3.4×1038) addresses, or approximately 5×1028 (roughly 295) addresses for each of the roughly 6.5 billion (6.5×109) people alive today.[1] In a different perspective, this is 252 addresses for every observable star in the known universe[2] – more than ten billion billion billion times as many addresses as IPv4 supported.
While these numbers are impressive, it is however not the intent of IPv6's address space design to assure virtual saturation of geographical space with usable addresses. Rather, the large number of addresses allows a hierarchical allocation of addresses and greater efficiency in route aggregation across the globe. With IPv4, complex Classless Inter-Domain Routing (CIDR) techniques were developed to make the best possible use of the small address space. Renumbering, when changing providers, can be a major effort with IPv4, as discussed in RFC 2071 and RFC 2072. With IPv6, however, renumbering of an entire network becomes largely automatic by simple prefix configuration in one or a few network routers, because the host identifiers (last 64 bits of address) are decoupled from subnet identifiers and the network provider's routing prefix. Each subnet in IPv6 usually has the size (64 bits) of the square of the size of entire IPv4 Internet. Thus, it appears that address space utilization in IPv6 will be low, but it provides for much improved efficiency in management and routing
Wikipedia
Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) is an Internet Layer protocol for packet switched internetworks. It is designated as the successor of IPv4, the first and still dominant version of the Internet Protocol, for general use on the Internet.
The main change brought by IPv6 is a much larger address space that allows greater flexibility in allocating addresses and routing traffic. The extended address length eliminates the need to use network address translation to avoid address exhaustion, and also simplifies aspects of address assignment and renumbering when changing Internet connectivity providers.
It is common to see examples that attempt to show that the IPv6 address space is extremely large. For example, IPv6 supports 2128 (about 3.4×1038) addresses, or approximately 5×1028 (roughly 295) addresses for each of the roughly 6.5 billion (6.5×109) people alive today.[1] In a different perspective, this is 252 addresses for every observable star in the known universe[2] – more than ten billion billion billion times as many addresses as IPv4 supported.
While these numbers are impressive, it is however not the intent of IPv6's address space design to assure virtual saturation of geographical space with usable addresses. Rather, the large number of addresses allows a hierarchical allocation of addresses and greater efficiency in route aggregation across the globe. With IPv4, complex Classless Inter-Domain Routing (CIDR) techniques were developed to make the best possible use of the small address space. Renumbering, when changing providers, can be a major effort with IPv4, as discussed in RFC 2071 and RFC 2072. With IPv6, however, renumbering of an entire network becomes largely automatic by simple prefix configuration in one or a few network routers, because the host identifiers (last 64 bits of address) are decoupled from subnet identifiers and the network provider's routing prefix. Each subnet in IPv6 usually has the size (64 bits) of the square of the size of entire IPv4 Internet. Thus, it appears that address space utilization in IPv6 will be low, but it provides for much improved efficiency in management and routing
Wikipedia