Learn IPv6

  Overview Internet Protocol version 6, is a new addressing protocol designed to incorporate whole sort of requirement of future internet known to us as Internet version 2. This protocol as its predecessor IPv4, works on Network Layer (Layer-3). Along with its offering of enormous amount of logical address space, this protocol has ample of features which addresses today’s shortcoming of IPv4. Why new IP version? So far, IPv4 has proven itself as a robust routable addressing protocol and has served human being for decades on its best-effort-delivery mechanism. It was designed in early 80’s and did not get any major change afterward. At the time of its birth, Internet was limited only to a few Universities for their research and to Department of Defense. IPv4 is 32 bits long which offers around 4,294,967,296 (2 32 ) addresses. This address space was considered more than enough that time. Given below are major points which played key role in birth of IPv6: Internet has grown exponenti...

  IPv4 since 1982, has been an undisputed leader of Internet. With IPv4’s address space exhaustion, IPv6 is now taking over the control of Internet, which is called Internet2. IPv4 is widely deployed and migration to IPv6 would not be easy. So far IPv6 could penetrate IPv4’s address space by less than 1%. The world has celebrated ‘World IPv6 Day’ on June 08, 2011 with a purpose to test IPv6 address over Internet in full. On June 06, 2012 the Internet community officially launched IPv6. This day all ISPs who were offering IPv6 were to enable it on public domain and were to keep it enable. All the device manufacturer also participated to offer IPv6 by-default enabled on devices. This was a step towards encouraging Internet community to migrate to IPv6. Organizations are provided plenty of ways to migrate from IPv4 to IPv6. Also organizations, willing to test IPv6 before migrating completely can run both IPv4 and IPv6 simultaneously. Networks of different IP versions can communicate a...

  Routing concepts remain same in case of IPv6 but almost all routing protocols have been redefined accordingly. We discussed earlier, how a host speaks to its gateway. Routing is a process to forward routable data choosing the best route among several available routes or path to the destination. A router is a device that forwards data that is not explicitly destined to it. There exists two forms of routing protocols: Distance Vector Routing Protocol : A router running distance vector protocol advertises its connected routes and learns new routes from its neighbors. The routing cost to reach a destination is calculated by means of hops between the source and destination. A router generally relies on its neighbor for best path selection, also known as “routing-by-rumors”. RIP and BGP are Distance Vector Protocols. Link-State Routing Protocol : This protocol acknowledges the state of a Link and advertises to its neighbors. Information about new links is learnt from peer routers. Afte...