IPv6

Also known as Internet Protocol version 6, Internet Protocol v6

Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) is the most recent version of the Internet Protocol (IP), the communications protocol that provides an identification and location system for computers on networks and routes traffic across the Internet. IPv6 was developed by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) to deal with the long-anticipated problem of IPv4 address exhaustion, and was intended to replace IPv4. In December 1998, IPv6 became a Draft Standard for the IETF, which subsequently ratified it as an Internet Standard on 14 July 2017.

AI overview

IPv6 is the latest version of the Internet Protocol, the fundamental system that identifies computers on networks and directs internet traffic. It was created to solve the problem of running out of unique addresses available under the older IPv4 system.

AI-generated from the Wikipedia summary — may contain errors.

Key facts

Networking protocol.title: Internet Protocol version 6
Networking protocol.image: class=skin-invert-image|300px|alt=Diagram of an IPV6 header
Networking protocol.image alt: Diagram of an IPv6 header
Networking protocol.caption: IPv6 header
Networking protocol.is stack: yes
Networking protocol.abbreviation: IPv6
Networking protocol.purpose: Internetworking protocol
Networking protocol.developer: Internet Engineering Task Force
Networking protocol.based on: IPv4
Networking protocol.osilayer: Network layer

via Wikipedia infobox

Wikidata facts

Image: IPv6 header-ar.svg

Show 4 more facts

Commons category: IPv6
Stack Exchange tag: serverfault.com/tags/ipv6
publication date: 1996-00-00
ACM Classification Code (2012): 10011489

Sources (5)

via Wikidata · CC0

~38 min read

Article

35 sections

Contents

Main features
Motivation and origin
IPv4 address exhaustion
Comparison with IPv4
Larger address space
Multicasting
Stateless address autoconfiguration (SLAAC)
IPsec
Simplified processing by routers
Mobility
Extension headers
Jumbograms
IPv6 packets
Addressing
Address representation
Link-local address
Address uniqueness and router solicitation
Global addressing
IPv6 in the Domain Name System
Transition mechanisms
Dual-stack IP implementation
ISP customers with public-facing IPv6
Tunneling
IPv4-mapped IPv6 addresses
Security
Shadow networks
IPv6 packet fragmentation
Standardization through RFCs
Working-group proposals
RFC standardization
Deployment
Peering issues
See also
References
External links

Devices on the Internet are assigned a unique IP address for identification and location definition. With the rapid growth of the Internet after commercialization in the 1990s, it became evident that far more addresses would be needed to connect devices than the 4 billion (232) addresses IPv4 made available. By 1998, the IETF had formalized the successor protocol, IPv6. This uses 128-bit addresses, yielding an address space of 2128, 1038, or 340 undecillion total addresses. Several transition mechanisms have been devised to allow IPv4 and IPv6 to interoperate, but IPv6 is not backwards-compatible with IPv4 and the two do not interoperate directly.