IPv6 provides other technical benefits in addition to a larger addressing space. However, several transition mechanisms have been devised to rectify this. The two protocols are not designed to be interoperable, and thus direct communication between them is impossible, complicating the move to IPv6.
The actual number is slightly smaller, as multiple ranges are reserved for special use or completely excluded from use. IPv6 uses 128- bit addresses, theoretically allowing 2 128, or approximately 3.4 ×10 38 total addresses. By 1998, the IETF had formalized the successor protocol. With the rapid growth of the Internet after commercialization in the 1990s, it became evident that far more addresses would be needed to connect devices than the IPv4 address space had available. ĭevices on the Internet are assigned a unique IP address for identification and location definition. In December 1998, IPv6 became a Draft Standard for the IETF, which subsequently ratified it as an Internet Standard on 14 July 2017. IPv6 was developed by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) to deal with the long-anticipated problem of IPv4 address exhaustion, and was intended to replace IPv4. Internet Protocol version 6 ( IPv6) is the most recent version of the Internet Protocol (IP), the communications protocol that provides an identification and location system for computers on networks and routes traffic across the Internet.
