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IPv6 is the successor to the first addressing infrastructure of the Internet, Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4). In contrast to IPv4, which defined an IP address as a 32-bit value, IPv6 addresses have a size of 128 bits. Therefore, in comparison, IPv6 has a vastly enlarged address space.
Unicast address assignments by a local Internet registry for IPv6 have at least a 64-bit routing prefix, yielding the smallest subnet size available in IPv6 (also 64 bits). With such an assignment it is possible to embed the unicast address prefix into the IPv6 multicast address format, while still providing a 32-bit block, the least ...
The payload length field of IPv6 (and IPv4) has a size of 16 bits, capable of specifying a maximum length of 65 535 octets for the payload. In practice, hosts determine the maximum usable payload length using Path MTU Discovery (yielding the minimum MTU along the path from sender to receiver), to avoid having to fragment packets.
Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4) was the first standalone specification for the IP address, and has been in use since 1983. [2] IPv4 addresses are defined as a 32-bit number, which became too small to provide enough addresses as the internet grew, leading to IPv4 address exhaustion over the 2010s.
This is a list of the IP protocol numbers found in the field Protocol of the IPv4 header and the Next Header field of the IPv6 header. It is an identifier for the encapsulated protocol and determines the layout of the data that immediately follows the header. Both fields are eight bits wide.
Packets that hold Internet Protocol data carry a 4-bit IP version number as the first field of its header. [1] [2] Currently, only IPv4 and IPv6 packets are seen on the Internet, having IP version numbers 4 and 6, respectively.
Whereas classful network design for IPv4 sized the network prefix as one or more 8-bit groups, resulting in the blocks of Class A, B, or C addresses, under CIDR address space is allocated to Internet service providers and end users on any address-bit boundary. In IPv6, however, the interface identifier has a fixed size of 64 bits by convention ...
While IPv4 uses 32 bits for addressing, yielding c. 4.3 billion (4.3 × 10 9) addresses, IPv6 uses 128-bit addresses providing c. 3.4 × 10 38 addresses. Although adoption of IPv6 has been slow, as of January 2023, most countries in the world show significant adoption of IPv6, [10] with over 41% of Google's traffic being carried over IPv6 ...