Networking Devices Questions & Answers

What is the difference between IPv4 and IPv6?

Follow Question Posted by Dexter on Jun 08, 2011

Hey all, today is the official IPV6 day and more than 400 sites including google, youtube, facebook and yahoo, are enabling the IPv6 for 24 hours (test your connection: http://ipv6test.google.com/).

So I'm quite tempted to understand what exactly changes? Any new exciting features or everything is basically the same with extended capacity, so to speak.

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2 Twisted on Jun 08, 2011

Level 2 IPv4 is replaced to solve the IP exhausion problems....it uses 32bits which is about 4 billion addresses and they`re expected to run out soon(2010-2011). On the other hand IPv6 addresses are 128 bits which is about 340,300,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 IP addresses. There are many other pros like IPv4 doesn`t have inbuilt QoS IPv6 has, when using IPv4 network packet fragmentation is done by the router or another layer 3 device, where as in IPv6 network it is done by the source node, in IPv4 ARP is used to track IP to MAC when in IPv6 NDP (Neighbor Discovery protocol) is used, IPv6 has simplified header format, it has a fixed length header which doesn`t include most of the options IPv4 includes. IPv6 contains two 128-bit addresses(source&destination) the whole header is 40 bytes only, which makes processing faster...options are dealt in extension headers which are inserted after the IPv6 header if needed, so if a packet needs to be fragmented the fragmentation header is inserted after the IPv6 header...
You can read more on the subject at Google :)

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3 InFlames on Jun 09, 2011

Level 2 Very informative answer...thanks....I was going to ask the same question when i read this topic

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4 Zildjian10 on Jun 13, 2011

Level 2 Thanks for the great post, Twisted.

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