VISVESVARAYA TECHNOLOGICAL UNIVERSITY

“Jnana Sangama”, Belagavi-18, Karnataka, India.

Report on

“Internet Protocol version 6(IPv6)”

A case study submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirement for the degree of

Bachelor of Engineering
In
Telecommunication Engineering
By

Gaurav Agarwal 1DS18TE075

7th sem B.E.

Under the guidance of
Dr.Smitha Sasi
Assistant Professor

Department of Telecommunication Engineering

DAYANANDA SAGAR COLLEGE OF ENGINEERING
BENGALURU -560078

2021-22
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Introduction
IPv6 is the most recent version of the Internet Protocol (IP), a communications protocol
that offers a mechanism for identifying and locating machines on networks and routing
data across the Internet. The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) created IPv6 to
address the long-awaited problem of IPv4 address exhaustion. IPv6 is designed to take
the place of IPv4. IPv6 became a Draft Standard for the IETF in December 1998, and it
was adopted as an Internet Standard on July 14, 2017.
A unique IP address is assigned to each device on the Internet in order to identify them
and define their location. With the rapid expansion of the Internet following its
commercialization in the 1990s, it became clear that considerably more addresses would
be required to connect devices than the IPv4 address space allowed. The successor
protocol was standardized by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) in 1998. IPv6
employs a 128-bit address, allowing for a total of 2128, or around 3.4*1038 addresses.
Multiple ranges are allocated for special usage or are completely excluded from use;
thus, the actual number is slightly lower. Because the two protocols were not designed
to be compatible, direct communication between them is impossible, making the
transition to IPv6 more difficult. To address this, a number of transition techniques have
been created.
In addition to a bigger addressing space, IPv6 has various technical advantages. It allows
hierarchical address allocation mechanisms, which simplify route aggregation over the
Internet and hence restrict routing table expansion. The usage of multicast addressing is
increased and simplified, resulting in additional service delivery improvements. The
protocol has been designed with device mobility, security, and configuration in mind.
Eight groups of four hexadecimal digits each, separated by colons, make up an IPv6
address. The complete representation, for example,
2001:0db8:0000:0000:0000:8a2e:0370:7334, can be abbreviated to
2001:db8::8a2e:370:7334.

History
The Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4) was first created in the 1970s, and the
fundamental protocol standard for IPv4 functionality, RFC 791, was published in 1981.
The lack of address space (availability) was recognized by 1992 as a serious limiting
problem to the continued use of the Internet operated on IPv4 due to the phenomenal
rise of Internet usage in recent years - especially by population dense countries like

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India and China.
The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) began designing and developing a suite of
protocols and standards currently known as Internet Protocol Version 6 (IPv6) as early
as 1994, with commendable foresight, as a viable tool to phase out and replace IPv4
over the following years. The amount and variety of IP capable devices being introduced
on the market, as well as their use by an increasingly tech savvy global populace, has
seen a surge. The new protocol intends to successfully accommodate the growing use
and functionality of the Internet while simultaneously addressing security issues. The
following is a quick rundown of the important events in the development of the new
protocol:
 In 1998, the basic protocol (RFC 2460) was published.
 In 2003, the RFCs for basic socket API (RFC 2553) and DHCPv6 (RFC 3315)
were published.
 RFC 3775 (Mobile IPv6) was published in 2004.
 In 2004, the flow label specifications (RFC 3697) were added.
 Architecture of the address (RFC 4291) stable, with a minor update in 2006.
 RFC 4294, Node Requirements, was issued in 2006.
Features of IPv6
The IPv6 protocol aims to address a number of important concerns, including the vast
proliferation of devices, the need for newer and more demanding applications on a
global scale, and the growing role of networks in the way businesses are conducted. The
IPv6 protocol has the following features:
 Non-essential and optional fields are moved to extension headers that are placed
after the IPv6 header, resulting in a new header structure that keeps header
overhead to a minimum. At intermediate routers, the simplified IPv6 header is
handled more quickly.
 IPv6 has a large address space, with source and destination IP addresses of 128
bits (16 bytes). IPv6's vast address space was created to support several levels of
subnetting and address allocation, from the Internet backbone to specific subnets
within a company. The use of address-conservation mechanisms like NATs is no
longer necessary.

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 Based on the regular occurrence of numerous levels of Internet service providers,
an efficient and hierarchical addressing and routing architecture has been
developed.
 In the lack or presence of a DHCP server, stateless and stateful address setup is
possible. Hosts on a link configure themselves automatically using link-local
addresses and communicate without the need for manual configuration.
 Built-in security: In IPv6, compliance with IPSec [10] is required, and IPSec is
an integral element of the protocol. IPv6 has header modifications that make
encryption, authentication, and virtual private networks easier to deploy (VPNs).
Although the functionality of IPSec is nearly identical in IPv6 and IPv4, one
advantage of IPv6 is that it may be used across the full route, from source to
destination.
 The Flow Label field in the IPv6 header provides better support for prioritized
delivery.
 The IPv6 Neighbor Discovery protocol replaces broadcast-based Address
Resolution Protocol (ARP), ICMPv4 Router Discovery, and ICMPv4 Redirect
messages with efficient multicast and unicast Neighbor Discovery messages.
 Extensibility- By inserting extension headers after the IPv6 header, IPv6 may
simply be extended for additional functionalities.
Thus, end-to-end security, mobile communications, quality of service (QoS), and
simpler system management are all possible with IPv6.

IPv4 vs IPv6
 IPv4 uses a 32-bit address, while IPv6 uses a 128-bit address.
 IPv4 uses a numeric addressing scheme, whereas IPv6 uses an alphanumeric
scheme.
 A dot (.) separates IPv4 binary bits, whereas a colon separates IPv6 binary bits
(:).
 There are 12 header fields in IPv4 and 8 header fields in IPv6.
 IPv4 supports broadcast, however IPv6 does not.
 Checksum fields are present in IPv4 but are absent in IPv6.

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 When comparing IPv4 and IPv6, we can see that IPv4 supports VLSM (Variable
Length Subnet Mask), whereas IPv6 does not.
 IPv4 maps to MAC address using ARP (Address Resolution Protocol), but IPv6
maps to MAC address using NDP (Neighbour Discovery Protocol).

IPv6 Fixed Header

The following information is contained in the IPv6 fixed header, which is 40

bytes long.
 Version (4 bits): This represents the Internet Protocol version, which is
0110.
 Traffic Class (8-bits): These 8 bits are split into two halves. The most
critical 6 bits are utilized for Type of Service, which informs the Router
about the services that should be offered for this packet. For Explicit
Congestion Notification (ECN), the least significant two bits are used.
 Flow Label (20 bits): This label is used to keep the packets in a
communication flowing in the same order. The source assigns a label to
the sequence to aid the router in determining if a packet belongs to a given
information flow. This field prevents data packets from being re-ordered.
It's made for real-time/streaming media.
 Payload Length (16 bits): This field is used to tell routers how much
information is contained in the payload of a given packet. Extension
Headers and Upper Layer data make up the payload. Up to 65535 bytes
can be indicated with 16 bits; however, if the Extension Headers contain
Hop-by-Hop Extension Header, the payload may exceed 65535 bytes, in
which case this field is set to 0.

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 Next Header (8-bits): This field is used to specify the kind of Extension
Header, or the Upper Layer PDU if the Extension Header is not present.
The type of Upper Layer PDU has the same values as IPv4.
 Hop Limit (8 bits): This field is intended to prevent packets from looping
indefinitely in the network. TTL in IPv4 is the same as this. As a link
(router/hop) is passed, the value of the Hop Limit field is decremented by
one. The packet is dropped when the field approaches 0.
 Source Address (128-bits): This field contains the address of the packet's
originator.
 Destination Address (128-bits): This field contains the address of the
packet's intended destination.

Addressing
The length of an IPv6 address is 128 bits. The IPv6 address space follows a different
design philosophy than the IPv4 address space, which relied on subnetting to maximize
the use of the limited address space. In IPv6, the address space is judged sufficient for
the time being, and a local area subnet always utilizes 64 bits for the host portion of the
address, referred to as the interface identifier, while the most significant 64 bits are
utilized as the routing prefix. While the misconception that IPv6 subnets are impossible
to scan persists, RFC 7707 acknowledges that patterns emerging from particular IPv6
address setting approaches and algorithms enable address scanning in many real-world
scenarios.
An IPv6 address's 128 bits are divided into 8 groups of 16 bits each. Each group is
separated by colons and expressed as four hexadecimal digits (also called hextets or
more officially hexadectets and informally a quibble or quad-nibble) (:).
2001:0db8:0000:0000:0000:ff00:0042:8329 is an example of this format.
There are three addressing methods in IPv6 representation:
 Unicast
 Multicast
 Anycast
Unicast Address: A single network interface is identified by a single Unicast Address.
A packet submitted to a unicast address is delivered to the interface that address

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identifies.

Multicast Address: A multicast destination address is acquired by numerous hosts,

referred to as a Group. These hosts do not have to be in the same location. If you send
a packet to this multicast address, it will be disseminated to all interfaces that match that
multicast address.
Anycast Address: A set of interfaces is given an Anycast Address. Only one member
interface will receive any packet sent to an anycast address (mostly nearest host
possible).
Advantages
 Efficient Routing: The size of the routing table in IPv6 is lowered to the point
where hierarchical address allocation is necessary for efficient routing. In
addition, rather than using a router, fragmentation is accomplished via a source
device. As a result, the Maximum Transmission Unit (MTU) protocol is
employed for path allocation.
 Increased Capacity: In comparison to ordinary IPv4 addressing, IPv6 uses a
128-bit addressing method, which provides additional address space. The
network and host components' lengths have been doubled. Even if there are more
web addresses, the resources are efficiently assigned, so they can be
accommodated.
 Direct Addressing: Instead of broadcast, IPv6 employs multicast addressing.
Large data packets are sent in multiple directions at the same time. As a result,
network capacity is drastically reduced.
 No Subnetting: Automatic configuration on IPv6 entirely eliminates subnetting
issues. Static IP addresses were phased out in favour of automatic configuration.
 Security: IPv6 was created with IPSec security in mind. Authentication Headers
(AH) are included in IPSec and provide authentication techniques incorporated
into the network firewall.
 Mobility: When devices are transferred from one location to another, IPv6 offers
seamless connections. This is accomplished by avoiding triangle routing, which
involves sending connections to proxies before transferring to the host. As a
result, all of the subnets are relocated to a new router without any renumbering.

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Disadvantages
 System Issues: IPv6 routing must be enabled depending on the type of system.
The IP address must be provided if it is enabled manually. Aside from that, the
IP address must be remembered. Because the IP address contains numerous
letters and digits, this work is difficult.
 Topology Support: Prefixes are difficult to fix on most topology designs when
the IPv6 protocol is utilised. This is due to the extra space provided by the IPv6
module.
 Device Upgrade: Many networking devices are not built for IPv6 adoption by
default. Even if the devices are constantly updated. This is difficult since a
seamless transformation necessitates expert advice.
 IP Address Assigning: Local Network Management should be involved in
assigning IP addresses to devices. This method is fairly difficult because it is done
manually.
 IP Scheme Conversion: The shift from IPv4 to IPv6 is long and complicated
since there is no backward compatibility. In addition, the Internet Service
Provider (ISP) must pay a fee in order to move between different protocols.
 Communication: Because IPv4 and IPv6 communication is so complicated, they
will only be able to communicate under exceptional circumstances. It is not
possible to communicate directly with each other.

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