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IPv6 (Internet Protocol version 6) is a version of the Internet Protocol (IP) intended to succeed IPv4, which is the communications protocol currently used to direct almost all Internet traffic. IPv6 will allow the Internet to support many more devices by greatly increasing the number of possible addresses.
06-06-2012
The Internet operates by transferring data between hosts in packets that are routed across networks as specified by routing protocols. These packets require an addressing scheme, such as IPv4 or IPv6, to specify their source and destination. Each host, computer or other device on the Internet must be assigned an IP address in order to communicate. The growth of the Internet has created a need for more addresses than are possible with IPv4, which allows 32 bits for an IP address, and therefore has 232 (4 294 967 296) possible addresses. IPv6, which was developed by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) to deal with this long-anticipated IPv4 address exhaustion, uses 128-bit addresses, allowing 2128 (approximately 3.4×1038) addresses. This expansion can accommodate vastly more devices and users on the internet as well as providing greater flexibility in allocating addresses and efficiency for routing traffic. It also eliminates the primary need for network address translation (NAT), which has gained widespread deployment as an effort to alleviate IPv4 address exhaustion.
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