Technological Advantages of IPv6

IPv6 is a technical evolution of IPv4. Many things that are familiar from working with IPv4 will remain or be similar. We do not have to master a completely new technology. The driving reason to develop a new protocol, was the expected address depletion. But the working group determined in the early nineties, that they had enough time to not only extend the address space in the protocol, but build in additional features which would make it a more efficient protocol to meet the growing requirements of future networks and services. So let us examine what the new key features are.

1. Extended address space

   An IPv4 address has 32 bits or 4 Bytes.
   Example: 192.168.0.1 (decimal notation)

   An IPv6 address has 128 bits or 16 Bytes.
   Example: FE80:0000:0000:0000:0202:B3FF:FE1E:8329 (hexadecimal notation)

   There are rules, to abbreviate the address, by omitting leading zeros and replacing a series of zeros by two colons.
   So the address above can be written as: FE80::202:B3FF:FE1E:8329.

   Many people argue, that we have enough IPv4 address space and that with technologies like NAT, where many users with private IP addresses can hide behind a single globally routable IP address, there is no issue about address space. There are several misconceptions behind this viewpoint. NAT imposes severe limitations when it comes to scalability and end-to-end