FREE ESSAY ON IPV4 VS. IPV6

IPV4 VS. IPV6

Evan Gilden
2/12/01
CIT/TCT 120
Ipv4 vs. Ipv6
Ipv4 is short Internet Protocol Version 4, the same goes for Ipv6. Most of todays
internet uses Ipv4 witch is almost 20 years old. There has been one magor problem with
Ipv4, it is running out of IP addresses (IP addresses are a unique identifirer for a
computer on the internet). Ipv6 fixes this problem along with many other more
insugnificant problems. Ipv6 also adds many iprovments to Ipv4 in ares such as routing
and network autoconfiguration. Ipv6 is supposed to replace Ipv4 in a gradually time
frame, with the two coexisting for many years. A Ipv4 address looks like this 10.1.1.1
and a Ipv6 address looks like this FEDC:BA98:7654:3210:FEDC:BA98:7654:3210. Ipv6 supports
addresses which are four times the number of bits as Ipv4 addresses (128 vs. 32). This is
4 Billion times 4 Billion times 4 Billion (2^^96) times the size of the Ipv4 address
space (2^^32). This works out to be: 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456

This is an extremely large address space. In a theoretical sense this is approximately
665,570,793,348,866,943,898,599 addresses per square meter of the surface of the planet
Earth (assuming the earth surface is 511,263,971,197,990 square meters). Security more to
Ipv6's superiority. Encrypting along with authentication are excelent features of Ipv6
that Ipv4 couldn't offer, and offers security headers. IPv6 also allows a sender and a
receiver to establish a high-quality, high-bandwith secure pathbetween each other.