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Posts Tagged ‘IPv4’

IPV6 | The Perfect Solution To Used Up Internet Address Space

The Internet is probably the most popular thing on this planet today. With everything from chats to voice calls and personal resumes to social networking happening over the internet, it is not surprising that many new devices are coming out to take advantage of this technology. Every device needs an IP address to communicate and this address space is fast exhausting. The IPV6 addressing scheme is supposed to help relieve this problem going forward.

The current IP address space is called the IPv4 scheme. In this scheme there are 32 bits split into four 8 bit fields. These addresses are represented in dotted decimal format and each octet can support values from 0 to 255. Overall this scheme can support 4.3 billion addresses.

While the address space looks pretty large, not all of this space is available for general use. There are many sections of this space that are reserved for special purpose. So the actual space is smaller than this big number. On top of that there are more devices online today than ever before to the spare addresses available for use are quite limited.

This shortage was foreseen by the industry and the researchers much earlier. There have been some very effective stop gap arrangements implemented to overcome this problem. Some of these techniques include Classless Inter Domain Routing (CIDR), Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) and Network Address Translation (NAT). As stated earlier these are not a solution, just stop gap arrangements.

The real way out of this shortage is a good long term solution. The long term solution must not only spare up more address space but also create enough spare addresses for all the needs in the foreseeable future. The IPV6 is that long term solution.

As compared to the 32 bit address scheme in IPV4, the IPv6 uses 128 bit space. This means one can have billions of billions addresses. This is more than sufficient for all the present and future needs for quite some time. Besides, with such a large address space, the service providers need not struggle with NAT, DHCP and other such solutions. This will also help improve the transparency in the internet domain too which is vital now a days.

Thus it is clear that IPv6 is the addressing scheme for the future. All the stakeholders have identified this and are taking steps to migrate to this solution. However, this cannot happen overnight as IPV4 is quite wide spread. But the transition has started, which is the most important thing.

Understanding IPv4 And Its Role In The Internet

IPv4 is a version of IP which is the Internet Protocol. It is the foundation of the modern internet. Curious about what a protocol is and how it runs the internet? That’s what this article is for.

A Protocol describes how separate computers can share information so that they both understand what’s going in. The IP protocol says how pieces of information are transmitted across the network between computers.

The idea is that the computer which is sending the information breaks it up into separate pieces called “packets”. Each one of these pieces gets a header section, which describes where it’s going, and a data section, which holds one small piece of the information.

The next step is to send the packets across the network. Computers that are called routers inspect the headers and decide what to do with them. If they know how to connect to the destination computer, then they will do so and deliver the packet. If they do not know how to connect to the destination computer, they will connect to another router and let that router find the destination. Eventually, a router is found that knows where to find the destination. One fascinating thing to note is that the protocol does not claim that every packet will arrive at all or, if it does arrive, in order or without duplicates.

After the packets get to their destination, the data pieces are put together to get the information that was transmitted. If packets were not received or arrived out of order, there is another protocol called TCP which stands for Transmission Control Protocol that corrects the issues.

TCP does this by tracking the order of the packets and sending acknowledgments to the sender for each packet it receives. If the sender doesn’t get acknowledgement for a packet, then it will be resent. This is why the phrase TCP/IP is often seen. The reason that two protocols are used instead of one is for flexibility. When broadcasting a video to massive amounts of people, it doesn’t really matter if a few packets get lost. It would also be computationally expensive to deal with an acknowledgement for every packet from every persons computer. Having two separate protocols makes it possible to just use one in cases where it’s better to do so.

This kind of flexible design is one of the primary reasons that the internet works so well. Because of it, new functionality can be added with one small new piece that builds on the work of other small pieces. IPv4 is only one both small and critical part of the internet.