has vast experience in providing IPv6 transition services to enterprises, service providers and manufacturers of all sizes.
Those that haven’t yet developed a plan for migration will benefit from 's extensive experience in current state assessment, development of practical transition plan and testing services.
Customers that are at an advanced stage of planning will also benefit from 's practical experience in rolling out and managing the next-generation of devices and networks.
What is IPv6?
IPv6 is the replacement Internet protocol for IPv4. It corrects some of the deficiencies of IPv4 and simplifies the way that addresses are configured and how they are handled by Internet hosts.
IPv4 has proven to be robust, easily implemented, and interoperable, and has stood the test of scaling an internetwork to a global utility the size of the Internet. However, the initial design did not anticipate the following conditions:
- Recent exponential growth of the Internet and the impending exhaustion of the IPv4 address space.
- The ability of Internet backbone routers to maintain large routing tables.
- Need for simpler auto configuration and renumbering.
- Requirement for security at the IP level (IPSec).
- Need for better support for real-time delivery of data, known as quality of service (QoS).
Why is IPv6 Needed Now?
With its 32-bit address format, IPv4 can handle a maximum 4.3 billion unique IP addresses. While this number may seem very large, it is not enough to sustain and scale the rapidly rising growth of the Internet. Although improvements to IPv4, including the use of NAT, have allowed the extended use of the protocol, address exhaustion is inevitable and could happen as soon as 2012.
With its 128-bit address format, IPv6 can support 3.4 x 1038 or 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456 unique IP addresses. This number of addresses is large enough to configure a unique address on every node in the Internet and still have plenty of addresses left over. It is also large enough to eliminate the need for NAT, which has its own inherent problems.
A few countries, governmental agencies, and multinational corporations have either already deployed or mandated deployment of IPv6 in their networks and software products. Some emerging nations have no choice but to deploy IPv6 because of the unavailability of new IPv4 addresses.
Advantages of IPv6
Besides providing an almost limitless number of unique IP addresses for global end-to-end reach-ability and scalability, IPv6 has the following additional advantages:
- Simplified header format for efficient packet handling.
- Larger payload for increased throughput and transport efficiency.
- Hierarchical network architecture for routing efficiency.
- Support for widely deployed routing protocols (OSPF, BGP, etc.).
- Auto configuration and plug-and-play support.
- Elimination of need for network address translation (NAT) and application layered gateway (ALG).
- Increased number of multicast addresses.