The Disadvantages of IPv4

Limited address space The most visible

and urgent problem with using IPv4 on the
modern Internet is the rapid depletion of
public addresses. Due to the initial address
class allocation practices of the early
Internet, public IPv4 addresses are becoming
scarce. Organizations in the United States
hold most public IPv4 address space
worldwide. This limited address space has
forced the wide deployment of network
address translators (NATs)

Flat routing infrastructure

In the early Internet, address prefixes were
not allocated to create a summarizable,
hierarchical routing infrastructure. Instead,
individual address prefixes were assigned
and each address prefix became a new
route in the routing tables of the Internet
backbone routers. Todays Internet is a
mixture of flat and hierarchical routing, but
there are still more than 85,000 routes in
the routing tables of Internet backbone
routers.

Configuration
IPv4 must be configured, either manually or
through the Dynamic Host Configuration
Protocol (DHCP). DHCP allows IPv4
configuration administration to scale to
large networks, but you must also configure
and manage a DHCP infrastructure.

Security Security for IPv4 is specified

by the use of Internet Protocol security
(IPsec). However, IPsec is optional for IPv4
implementations. Because an application
cannot rely on IPsec being present to
secure traffic, an application might resort
to other security standards or a
proprietary security scheme. The need for
built-in security is even more important
today, when we face an increasingly
hostile environment on the Internet.

Prioritized delivery Prioritized packet

delivery, such as special handling parameters
for low delay and low variance in delay for
voice or video traffic, is possible with IPv4.
However, it relies on a new interpretation of
the IPv4 Type Of Service (TOS) field, which is
not supported for all the devices on the
network. Additionally, identification of the
packet flow must be done using an upper
layer protocol identifier such as a TCP or User
Datagram Protocol (UDP) port. This additional
processing of the packet by intermediate
routers makes forwarding less efficient.

Mobility
Mobility is a new requirement for Internetconnected devices, in which a node can
change its address as it changes its
physical attachment to the Internet and still
maintain existing connections. Although
there is a specification for IPv4 mobility,
due to a lack of infrastructure,
communications with an IPv4 mobile node
are inefficient.

The replacement for IPv4 is IPv6.

Huge address space IPv6 addresses are

128 bits long, creating an address space
with 3.4 1038 possible addresses. This
is plenty of address space for the
foreseeable future and allows all manner
of devices to connect to the Internet
without the use of NATs. Address space
can also be allocated internationally in a
more equitable manner.

Hierarchical routing infrastructure IPv6

addresses that are reachable on the IPv6
portion of the Internet, known as global
addresses, have enough address space for
the hierarchy of Internet service providers
(ISPs) that typically exist between an
organization or home and the backbone of
the Internet. Global addresses are designed
to be summarizable and hierarchical,
resulting in relatively few routing entries in
the routing tables of Internet backbone
routers.

Automatic configuration
IPv6 hosts can automatically
configure their own IPv6 addresses
and other configuration parameters,
even in the absence of an address
configuration infrastructure such as
DHCP.

Required support for IPsec headers

Unlike IPv4, IPv6 support for IPsec protocol
headers is required. Applications can always
rely on industry standard security services
for data sent and received. However, the
requirement to process IPsec headers does
not make IPv6 inherently more secure. IPv6
packets are not required to be protected
with Authentication Header (AH) or
Encapsulating Security Payload (ESP). For
more information about IPsec, AH, and ESP,
see Chapter 18, Internet Protocol Security

Better support for prioritized

delivery
IPv6 has an equivalent to the IPv4 TOS
field that has a single interpretation for
nonstandard delivery. Additionally, a Flow
Label field in the IPv6 header indicates
the packet flow, making the
determination of forwarding for
nondefault delivery services more
efficient at intermediate routers.

Support for mobility

Rather than attempting to add
mobility to an established protocol
with an established infrastructure
(as with IPv4), IPv6 can support
mobility more efficiently.

IPv6 Addressing
The IPv6 address is 128 bits long, creating
an address space of almost inconceivable
size. With 128 bits you can express more
than 3.4 1038 combinations. Unlike IPv4
unicast addresses, the structure of an IPv6
unicast address is very simple: The first 64
bits are for a subnet prefix and the last 64
bits are for an interface identifier. Although
you can perform variable- length
subnetting within the 64 bits of the subnet
prefix, the host ID equivalent for IPv6 is
always the same size.

Basics of IPv6 Address Syntax

With such a large address space,
expressing an individual IPv6 address
became problematic.
The designers of IPv6 settled on colonhexadecimal notation, which divides the
128-bit address into eight 16-bit blocks
separated by colons. Each 16-bit block is
expressed in hexadecimal format (rather
than decimal format for IPv4). The result is
the IPv6 address.

The following are some examples of

IPv6 unicast addresses:
2001:DB8:2A:41CD:2AA:FF:FE5F:47D1
FE80:0:0:0:2AA:FF:FE5F:47D1
FD47:2AD1:494E:41CD:2AA:FF:FE5F:47
D1

For example:
FE80:0:0:0:2AA:FF:FE5F:47D1
becomes FE80::2AA:FF:FE5F:47D1
FF02:0:0:0:0:0:0:1 (a multicast
address) becomes FF02::1

To express a subnet prefix, a route, or an

address range, IPv6 uses the network prefix
length notation (also used for Classless
Inter-Domain Routing [CIDR] for IPv4). There
are no subnet masks in IPv6. For example,
2001:DB8:2A:41CD::/64 is a subnet prefix;
2001:DB8:2A::/48 is a summarized route;
and FF00::/8 is an address range (the range
of all IPv6 multicast addresses).

Types of Addresses
IPv6 defines three types of addresses:
unicast, multicast, and anycast. Unicast
and multicast addresses work in the same
way as they do for IPv4. An anycast
address, however, is a strange mixture of
unicast and multicast. Whereas a unicast
address is used for one-to-one delivery and
a multicast address is used for one-tomany delivery, an anycast address is used
for one-to one- of-many delivery.

Types of Unicast Addresses

Just as there are different types of
IPv4 unicast addresses (such as
public and private), there are
different types of IPv6 unicast
addresses.
- Global address
- Link-Local Addresses
- Unique Local Addresses

Global
Global addresses are the equivalent of
IPv4 public addresses. Global addresses
are globally reachable on the IPv6
Internet. Unlike public IPv4 address
prefixes, which are a combination of flat
and summarizable address spaces, IPv6
global addresses are easier to aggregate
and summarize at address space
boundaries. This results in fewer routes in
the various routing domains of the
Internet.

Link-Local Addresses
Link-local addresses, which are used on
the same link, are equivalent to Automatic
Private IP Addressing (APIPA) IPv4
addresses used by current Microsoft
desktop and server operating systems.
Link-local addresses are automatically
configured and can be used to provide
automatic addressing for nodes connected
to the same network segment when there
is no router present. Link-local addresses
always begin with FE80.

Unique Local Addresses

Unique local addresses are defined to be
used within the sites of an organization but
not on the IPv6 Internet. Unique local
addresses are roughly equivalent to private
IPv4 addresses except that part of a unique
local address prefix is randomly generated
to prevent address duplication between
sites of an organization and between
organizations. Unique local
addresses begin with FD or FC.

IPv6 Interface Identifiers

The interface identifier, the last 64 bits of an
IPv6 unicast address, can be determined in
the following ways:
Randomly generated to prevent address
scans on a link
Derived from the MAC address of the
network adapter
to which the address is
assigned
Randomly generated to provide IPv4equivalent anonymity for client-initiated
traffic
Assigned during a Point-to-Point Protocol

DNS Support
To resolve domain names to IPv6 addresses,
RFC 1886 defines the use of the AAAA (or
quad-A) Domain Name System (DNS)
resource record to resolve a DNS name to
an IPv6 address. The AAAA record is
analogous to the address (A) record that
exists for resolving a DNS name to an IPv4
address. To obtain an AAAA record in a DNS
query response, a querying host must
specify either AAAA records or all records in
its DNS query.

For example, for the IPv6 address

2001:DB8:0:41CD:2AA:FF:FE5F:47D1
(fully expressed as
2001:0DB8:0000:41CD:02AA:00FF:FE5F:47D1),
the name in the reverse domain namespace Is
1.D.7.4.F.5.E.F.F.F.0.0.A.A.2.0.D.C.1.4.0.0.0.0.8.B
.D.0.1.0.0.2.IP6.ARPA.

Core Protocols of IPv6

The core protocols of the IPv6 protocol
suite consist of the following:
IPv6
Internet Control Message Protocol for
IPv6 (ICMPv6)
Neighbor Discovery (ND)
Multicast Listener Discovery (MLD)

IPv6
The IPv6 header is described in RFC 2460.
It has a new, streamlined design that
removes unneeded fields and moves
seldom-used fields to extension headers.
Even with addresses that are four times
larger than IPv4 addresses, the size of the
IPv6 header is only twice as large as the
IPv4 header, with a 40-byte fixed size.
Although larger, the IPv6 header contains
fewer fields and is more efficiently
processed by routers. Like IPv4, IPv6 is
connectionless and provides a best-effort
delivery to the destination.

ICMPv6
ICMPv6, defined in RFC 4443, provides error
reporting and diagnostic functions for IPv6.
Additionally, ICMPv6 provides a common
packet structure for the messages of ND
and MLD. Analogous to ICMP for IPv4,
ICMPv6 provides the following types of
messages:
Echo Request
Echo Reply
Destination Unreachable
Time Exceeded
Parameter Problem

Neighbor Discovery
ND, defined in RFC 4861, consists of a set of
ICMPv6 messages, message options, and defined
processes that allow neighboring nodes to
discover each other, discover the routers on the
link, and provide support for host redirection.
ND replaces the following facilities in IPv4:
Address Resolution Protocol (ARP)
ICMP Router Discovery
ICMP Redirect

ND defines the following processes:

Address resolution
Duplicate address detection
Router discovery
Redirect
Neighbor unreachability
detection

Multicast Listener Discovery

MLD, defined in RFC 2710, is the IPv6
equivalent to Internet Group
Management Protocol (IGMP) version 2
for IPv4. MLD defines ICMPv6
messages that are used by hosts to
register group membership, by hosts
to leave a group, and by routers to
query the subnet for group
membership.

Differences Between IPv4 and IPv6

Summary

The IPv6 suite of protocols is a revision of

the Internet Layer protocols of the current
TCP/IP protocol suite and replaces IP, ICMP,
IGMP, and ARP. IPv6 attempts to solve the
problems of IPv4 with efficient and plentiful
addressing, a streamlined Internet Layer
header that is easier for routers to process,
and more efficient neighboring node
interaction.