Essay --

Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) Any information presented about IP version 6 (IPv6) will not be complete without talking about IP version 4 (IPv4), its predecessor. For completeness, a brief introduction of IPv4 will be made. In the networking of computers and devices, the Internet Protocol (IP) plays a very important role. The IP, found at the internet layer of the Department of Defence (DoD) model provides the means for the devices to communicate using logical addresses called IP addresses. The importance of an IP address to communication will be felt in the analogy of a surface mail. How possible would it be to send a letter to someone whose address we do not know? The IP address enables us to know the source of a packet and the destination for proper delivery by the IP protocol. IPv6 motivation The development of IPv6 is motivated by the inadequacies of its predecessor IPv4. IPv4 is an addressing scheme that makes use of 32 bits in groups of 8 bits each to identify a device. Each address represents a number in the decimal range 0 to 255 in each of the four octets that represent it. Due to the 32-bit size of the address, the maximum number of IPv4 addresses that can be used is thus limited to 232, approximately 4.3 billion addresses (4,294,967,296). For an addressing scheme that was just to serve as a test of the concept of networking, the possibility of its exhaustion was a remote one. The reality however of the exhaustion of the available IPv4 addresses due to the astronomical increase in the number of people and devices on the internet that need IPv4 addresses gave rise to the development of IPv6. IPv6 Structure IPv6 is a routable protocol that is responsible for the addressing, routing, and fragmenting of packets by the ... ...ters. Devices that do not support IPv6 may require only a firmware upgrade with the new IPv6 stack if the equipment manufacturer so provides it. Or else, such equipment will need to be totally replaced with a new one that supports IPv6. The softwares in use may support both IPv4 and IPv6. Most of the recent releases of major operating systems have deployed and supported the use of IPv6 in their operating systems. Windows operating system however does not fully support IPv6 despite the quest for its adoption being pushed by Microsoft. The use of the full colon of the IPv6 IP address in the address bar of a browser will make the operating system think it is a reference to a drive. The cumbersome way around this is to use a domain translation where the colons are replaced with dashes and the characters '.ipv6.literal.net' has to be appended to the end of the address. â€Æ'