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Old 05-10-2004, 09:09 AM  
DYN_DaTa
Senior Member
 
Join Date: Jan 2002
Location: Madrid, Spain
Posts: 346
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Quote:
Originally posted by bRaNcO
whats the advantage of using IPv6?
According to this article:


Bigger address space

The bigger address space IPv6 offers is the most obvious enhancement it has over IPv4. While today's Internet architecture is based on 32-bit wide addresses, the new version has 128-bit technology available for addressing. Thanks to the enlarged address space, workarounds like NAT don't have to be used anymore. This allows full, unconstrained IP connectivity for today's IP-based machines as well as upcoming mobile devices like PDAs and cell phones -- all will benefit from full IP access through GPRS and UMTS.


Mobility

When mentioning mobile devices and IP, it's important to note that a special protocol is needed to support mobility, and implementing this protocol -- called "Mobile IP" -- is one of the requirements for every IPv6 stack. Thus, if you have IPv6 going, you have support for roaming between different networks, with global notification when you leave one network and enter the other one. Support for roaming is possible with IPv4 too, but there are a number of hoops that need to be jumped in order to get things working. With IPv6, there's no need for this, as support for mobility was one of the design requirements for IPv6. See [RFC3024] for some more information on the issues that need to be addressed with Mobile IP on IPv4.


Security

Besides support for mobility, security was another requirement for the successor to today's Internet Protocol version. As a result, IPv6 protocol stacks are required to include IPsec. IPsec allows authentication, encryption, and compression of IP traffic. Except for application-level protocols like SSL or SSH, all IP traffic between two nodes can be handled without adjusting any applications. The benefit of this is that all applications on a machine can benefit from encryption and authentication, and that policies can be set on a per-host (or even per-network) basis, not per application/service. An introduction to IPsec with a roadmap to the documentation can be found in [RFC2411], the core protocol is described in [RFC2401].


About IPv6 addresses: with IPv4 it could be 2^32 IPs (4.294.967.296) and with IPv6 that number increases to 2^128 (3.402823669 e38).

One example: the IPv4 address 193.110.128.200 will be 2002:0450:0009:0010:0000:0000:0000:0071 in IPv6 or 2002:450:9:10::71 (abbreviatted).
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