IPv4 vs IPv6

DAY 4: Slytherin EduTech Pvt. Ltd. | Sadiya B.

??IP addresses let computers and devices communicate with one another over the internet. Without them, no one would know who’s saying what, or to whom. But there are actually two types of IP address — and the differences between IPv4 and IPv6 are significant.

IPv4:

IPv4 was developed in the early 1980s. In those days, we had to know a website’s numeric IP address in order to access it over the internet. Then, the Domain Name Service (DNS) came along, which translates numbers into the names we currently see in the URLs we use as we navigate the web.

So when you enter "Slytherin EduTech Pvt. Ltd." into your browser's URL field, the DNS translates that name back into a number (e.g., 104.103.88.45). That enables us to navigate the web much more conveniently because it’s much easier to recall a website’s name than a bunch of numbers that make up its IP address.

An example IPv4 address looks like this — 192.168.1.1

Here are a few facts about IPv4:

• IPv4 uses a 32-bit address space, meaning that a total of 4.3 billion unique IP addresses can be assigned to hosts.
• There are a number of special blocks reserved for private networks (Class A, B, and C), roughly 18 million addresses, and 270 million are reserved for multicast addresses.
• IPv4 is written in a decimal notation where each octet is separated by a dot (i.e., 1.2.3.4).
• Internet Protocol Security (IPSec) is optional in IPv4, and the minimum fragmented packet size is 576 bytes.
• Network address translation (NAT) is used to further limit IP address exhaustion.

IPv6:

Internet Protocol version 6, or IPv6, was first introduced in the late 1990s as a replacement for IPv4. It uses 128-bit addresses formatted as eight groups of four hexadecimal numbers separated by colons. IPv6 is the solution that addresses the relatively limited number of IP addresses possible under IPv4. Under IPv6, there will no longer be a shortage of the total number of possible addresses.

An example IPv6 address looks like this — 2002:0de6:0001:0042:0100:8c2e:0370:7234.

Here are a few facts about IPv6:

• IPv6 uses 128-bit addresses, allowing 3.4 x 10^38 unique IP addresses. This is equal to 340 trillion trillion trillion IP addresses. This means that every device on the internet can have a unique IPv6 address.
• IPv6 is written in hexadecimal notation, separated into 8 groups of 16 bits by the colons, thus (8 x 16 = 128) bits in total.
• IPv6 can be configured manually, using Stateless Address Auto Configuration (SLAAC), or DHCPv6.
• IPv6 has a minimum packet size of 1280 bytes consisting of a fixed 40-byte base header and 1240 bytes of payload (user data).
• IPv6 is supported by many operating systems like Linux, macOS, Solaris, (Free, Open, and Net) BSD, and Windows.