Built-in Features and advantages of IPv6

IPv6 Features and Advantages

The IPv6 is the successor of IPv4 and has several advantages over IPv4 and is being widely used nowadays.


Larger Address Space: As IPv6 is 128 bit, the scalability of this is huge. We can have up to 340 trillion addresses. Thus we feel these IP addresses will never get consumed. (But you never know J )

Simple Header for Router Efficiency: The encapsulation is simpler than that of IPv4. As IPv6 does not have any checksum thus reduces the burden of processing for other endpoint devices.

No Broadcasts: IPv6 does not have concept of broadcast which reduces utilization of devices in the same subnet.

Stateful and Stateless Auto configuration: This means that using IPv6, host configuration is simplified and can be used in both case where a DHCPv6 server is present (Stateful) and in situations where DHCPv6 server is not available (Stateless).

Support for Built-in Mobile IP: This is a major feature taking into consideration the use of mobile devices. This helps a device to roam into different wireless networks without the connection breaking.

Builtin IP Sec Security: In IPv4, IP Sec was added later as an add-on but with IPv6 IP Security is built-in. Devices can negotiate the security parameters dynamically to build a tunnel for secure communication and we get this without any user intervention.

Possess Transition features: As there are already millions of devices using IPv4 addresses and it is not easy to switch to IPv6 immediately, thus there are some transition mechanisms that help devices between different IP versions i.e. IPv4 and IPv6 to communicate with each other.

Dual Stack: Allows both protocols to be running simultaneously

Tunneling:  is used to tunnel the IPv4 under a IPv6 and vice versa

NAT-PT: Translate the IPv4 address to IPv6 address. It stands for Network Address Translation – Protocol Translation or Proxy Translation.

No more need of NAT: As sufficient IPv6 addresses are available, no need to do NAT.

Neighbor Discovery: The usage of Neighbor Discovery Protocol in IPv6 is used in place of ARP used with IPv4.

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