Ipv6 Research Paper

Back in 1966, when the United States military invented the ARPA network program, who would have thought that the internet would eventually become so pervasive, not only throughout the United States, but also the world? Most everyone I know has a computer (a laptop or desktop), a tablet, an internet enabled game device like PlayStation 3 or Xbox 360, or a smart phone. Some even have all of the above! What most people don’t realize is that with each one of those devices, you have to have an IP address to ensure that you can connect to the internet. Because more and more people around the world are using more internet enabled devices, the world is very quickly running out of IP addresses.
History of IPv6 Up until very recently, every device used an Internet Protocol Version 4 (or IPv4) address. Since those addresses are becoming more scarce by the day, “the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) initiated, as early as 1994, the design and development of a suite of protocols and standards now known as the Internet Protocol Version 6 (IPv6)”. (1) The goal of this new protocol was to effectually maintain the continually growing population of internet enabled devices. IPv6 will eventually phase out and replace IPv4. Now you may ask, why are we running out of IPv4 addresses? Besides the fact that it seems that everybody and their mother has some sort of internet enabled device, IPv4 has approximately four billion IP addresses. Now at a first glance that may seem like a lot. But if you consider that according to a study by the NPD group, earlier this year, there are more than 500 million internet enabled devices in homes in the United States. That would be 5.7 devices for each household, including smart phones. (2) Now that’s just the U.S. That doesn’t include the rest of the world.
Comparison of IPv4 and IPv6 There are several differences in IPv4 and IPv6. The main difference in the two is the use of address space that contains addressing