Basic Understanding of IPv6

I know IPv6 is not a new technology per say, but there is every need for many more people to understand atleast the basic workings of this protocol for the internet. IPv6 is a huge, infact gigantic departure from IPv4, the one we are most conversant with, the one on the brink of complete exhaustion. 

IPv4 as many of us rightly know is a 32 bit value or character, which at the time it was introduced, seemed a lot, though they lacked real vision at the time to have limited the address space the way they did (Internet Engineering Task Force), given that it produced exactly 4 294 967 296 (Four Billion, two hundred and Ninety four Million, Nine hundred and sixty seven thousand, two hundred and ninety six) unique combinations. 

I am not supposed to go into IPv4 as the heading says IPv6, but in other to appreciate so much what IPv6 brings to the table, we need to understand IPv4 and know exactly what we are departing and where we need to be. 

IPv4 is seperated into three classes with varying address lenghts, which has class A given a total address lenght of 126 (got from (2ˆ8)-2) please it should be on record that this is the network address, and the first bit of the octet is always set to 0, meaning that the first octet starts from 1-127, e.g of a class A ip address is 255.0.0.0

We should also remember that 127 is reserved for loopback addresses only, effectively making it 126 we got above. The same procedure can be applied in class B, only that there is no loopback addresses in class B.The breaking down of these ip addresses is called subnetting, which we will definitely not go into in this particular article, but maybe in sbsequent articles, we can go into details, the act of subnetting. 

Now into the main business of the day, IPv6, which so nfortunately my country is one of the African countries still lagging far behind in the use and assigning of this protocol. Maybe because there is no red alert yet in the IPv4 registery of African Region. But like i wrote in my previous post, that you can`t begin to imagine IoT if you are not running totally IPv6, because there won`t be just enough space in IPv4. 

The main goal of IPv6 creation is to increase the Internet`s address space, but then, it also has some ehancements to the IPv4, including an autoconfiguration feature, built-in security through the IPsec protocol, more IP header flexibility and simplicity. Most of us are very conversant with the address mode of IPv4 (192.168.1.0) but not many people are very conversant with the way IPv6 is written and ways to assign network and host addresses. 

IPv6 addresses are denoted by eight groups of hexadecimal quartets separated by colons inbetween them, making it instantly differrent from what we know in IPv4. 

Take a look at how IPv6 address looks like, 2001:bdca:0000:0000:0000:0000:2324:0001, now when you look at this address, it is not exactly the easiest address to remember, but wait, we can still do something about the address, to make it a lot easier to write and recall. It can be re-written as 2001:bdca::2324:1, looks simpler and easier to remember i guess, but not as easy as IPv4 we are used to anyway. 

In explanation to the reduced IPv6 address, any four digit group of zeros in an IPv6 address can be replaced with double colon, and the leading zeros can be removed, like the three zeros attached to 1, also, each of the octet is 16-bit long, unlike the IPv4 that is 8 bit long. 

I will not go deeper into the technical part of this IPv6 which was not my intention from the outset, but to atleast let us be able to explain what IPv6 means to anybody.