[Migration from IPv4 to

IPv6]
[Author: Jean-Yves Tounda]

Abstract
Over the past 10 years, the number of Internet users has increased dramatically.
This has lead to the exhaustion of IP version 4 addresses. The Asia-Pacific
Network Information Centre (APNIC) has officially run out of IPv4 addresses on 15
April 2011. The worlds population has reached 7 billion on 31 st of October 2011.
IPv4 is on the verge of completely running out; therefore, in the late 90s the
Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) working closely with engineers from within
the Internet community came up with a new Internet protocol called IPv6. This
new protocol is supposed to take over the Internet and get rid of some
imperfections that came with IPv4. However, over 10 years later this protocol has
not been fully implemented.

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Introduction
To start, lets see what an IP address is. Those who have access to the Internet
uses it on devices such as desktop computers, laptop computers and even
mobile phones. The Internet has become many things to different people; it is
being used many places if not everywhere. It has become Omni present in
todays society; it is mainly useful to communicate from one IP enabled device to
another (computer to computer).
A good example will be the postal system in order to explain what it is. Lets say
someone wants to send a letter to a friend in a different city. This person will
need to write an address where this letter can be delivered; this can be seen as
the home address including house number. For a device to be part of the internet
(a huge coalition of networks) it has to be in possession of a unique IP address.
IP address: This is a unique set of numbers needed to identify a device on the
internet. This address consists of two parts which are the following:
i)

Network portion - This part identifies which network does the device
possessing the address belongs to.

ii)

Host portion This part identifies a specific node/host on a given

network

At the time of this report (2015) the fourth version of Internet protocol (IPv4) is
the main type of addresses issues on the Internet. IPv4 is 32 bit long, which is
segmented into four octets; here is an example:
01000100.00001111.11100111.11100011 (every 1 or 0 represent a one bit).To
get an IP address. Those octets have to be converted into decimal numbers from
0 to 255 in order to get an IP address.
This method can produce approximately 4billion of usable IPv4 addresses.
However, with the increased of users connecting themselves to the internet, IPv4
struggles to keep up with the demand and is on the verge of completely running
out. This is where IPv6 comes to the rescue by bringing a pool of IP addresses
that is large enough to provide addresses for the fast growing human population
and more.

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A closer look into IPv6

IPv6 is 128 bit long opposed to 32 bit on IPv4. IPv6 can provide 2^128 IP
addresses.
2^128 = 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456
This translates to: 340 undecillion, 282 decillion, 366 nonillion, 920 octillion, 938
septillion, 463 sextillion, 463 quintillion, 374 quadrillion, 607 trillion, 431 billion,
768 million, 211 thousand and 456
IPv6 format is composed of 32 hexadecimal digits arranged into eight groups of
four hexadecimal numbers separated by colons (:). For instance:
2001:0db8:0000:000b:0000:0000:0000:001A..
This is a long number that fortunately can be simplified by cancelling leading
zeroes:
- < 2001:0db8:0000:000b:0000:0000:0000:001A > can be written as
<2001:db8:0:b:0:0:0:1A>
It is also possible to get rid of consecutive zeroes, another way of simplifying an
IPv6 address:
<2001:db8:0:b:0:0:0:1A> can be written as <2001:db8:0:b::1A>
However, it is not possible to have more than one pair of colons (::) in an IPv6
address as in this case there will be no way to decide the size of each block of
zeroes.
The Interface ID in case of an IPv6 address is always 64 bit long, allowing the end
user to have devices at the interface LAN.

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Advantages of using IPv6 addresses

IPv6 comes with some of benefits:
First, it comes with a larger address space; Kaushik Das states that one of the
main benefits of Internet protocol version 6 compared to its predecessor is the
large address space it is able to hold. It is able to support 128-bit addresses (in
contrast to 32-bit address space with IPv4) and is technically able to support
2128 or 3.4W1038 unique IP addresses. He also mentions that with this
capability, IPv6 is able to provide a unique address to every single node on the
internet with a lot more left (Kaushik Das, 2008).
Steve Leibson backs up this argument by saying that we could assign and IP
address for every single atom existing on the entire globe and still have enough
to assign the same number for hundreds. It is unlikely that IPv6 runs out of
addresses any time soon (Steve Leibson, 2008).
Second, there is NAT which stands for Network Address Translation. There is a big
argument as to whether IPv6 will get rid of NAT. Fernando Gont a networking and
security consultant explains that NAT was initially introduced to keep scarce IPv4
network addresses. For instance, he says NAT is the protocol used today for
connecting and entire home network to the internet with only one public IPv4
address usually assigned by an Internet Service Provider (ISP) (Fernando Gont,
2011).
He also states that NAT breaks the principles of end-to-end communication by
rewriting the IPv4 address as well as port number of the datagrams being
forwarded. It also prevents direct communications from one host outside the
network to one host inside the network. This is because NAT requires the
communication to be initiated from the internal network. He also mentioned that,
NAT increases the fragility of a network, as the failure of NAT will result in the
entire network being cut off. On top of that NAT represents an issue for
application such as peer-to-peer network that needs an end-to-end connectivity
in order to work (Fernando Gont, 2011).
With IPv6 fully implemented, NAT attributes will be useless as IPV6 has enough
addresses for every node.

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Differences between IPv4 and IPv6

IPv4

IPv6

Deployed

1981

1999

SizeofaddressFormat

32 bitDotted
Decimal Notation:

128 bit
Hexadecimal
Notation:

PrefixNotation
Size
IPSecsupport
ProtocolformappingIP
addressestoMAC
addresses

BroadcastMessages

172.1.0.104
172.1.0.0/24
32

128

Optional
Address Resolution
Protocol (ARP)

Inbuilt
Neighbor Discovery
Protocol (NDP)

Available
Not available

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2011:1006::6 2011:
1006::1 / 48

- Address Space
The first difference between the two protocols is the address space. IPv6 has a
much bigger capacity, as it can support more nodes on it network. IPv4s address
space is 2^32 which is about 4.3 billion addresses. IPv6 however, is estimated to
be 340 trillion, trillion, trillion which can be written as 2^128.

- External data representation

Lawrence E. Hughes who is a co-founder and CTO of Sixscape Communications
explain those differences very well. He first starts by saying; there is one obvious
difference, which is the annotation. IPv6 is written with colons (:) for instance
2001:470:20::2 - opposed to dotted decimal representation of ipv4 eg.
192.168.10.1.
Internal representation of both protocols is the same as there are a string of bits.
However, because IPv6 is bigger it is represented with 128 bit opposed to 32 bits
for ipv4.
Externally, IPv4 is represented with 4 field of 8bits each using up to 3 decimal
digits for one octet going from 0 to 255. Also, leading 0 can be written of in each
field.
IPv6 is represented with up to 8 fields of 16 bits each. It can be written with up to
4 hexadecimal digits in each field going from 0 to ffff. Colons are what separate
each field and all leading zeros can be eliminated (Lawrence E. Hughes,
2014).

- Packet header
The packet header is established at the beginning of the packets. The packet
header works like the postage packages system. There is a from addresses
where the packet is being sent from in this case called the source address and a
to address where the packet is sent to also called the destination address.

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IPv4 Packet header is 20 bytes long and as the table illustrates it is full of section
that may or may not be necessary.
Version

IHL

Types of service (TOS)

Total Length

(4bit)

(4bits)

(8bits)

(16bits)

Identification (Fragmented ID)

(16bits)

D
F

M
F

Fragmented Offset (13bits)

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Conclusion
Ipv6 has been created almost 15 years ago, but has struggled to take over the
Internet. The actual migration process is not the issue here. The problem is what
companies will have to give up in order to switch from IPv4 to IPv6. ISPs and
major organizations are the ones that manages most of the Internet users and
therefore should be the ones making the first steps towards IPv6. NAT (Network
address Translation) which is currently used by many ISP such as BT(British
Telecom) helps IPv4 to hold a little bit longer but cannot avoid the inevitable
truth that IPv4 will eventually run out.

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Bibliography
Kaushik Das (2008) [Online] Available from:
<http://ipv6.com/articles/general/IPv6-Addressing.htm> [Accessed on:
14 November 2014]
Steve Leibson (2008) [Online] Available from: <
http://www.edn.com/electronics-blogs/other/4306822/IPV6-How-ManyIP-Addresses-Can-Dance-on-the-Head-of-a-Pin-> [Accessed on: 05
November 2014]
(Fernando Gont, 2011) [Online] Available from:
<http://searchenterprisewan.techtarget.com/tip/Why-IPv6-wont-rid-theInternet-of-Network-Address-Translation> [Accessed on 12 November
2014]
Lawrence E. Hughes (2014) [Online] Available from:
<http://www.sixscape.com/joomla/sixscape/index.php/ipv6-training-certification/ipv6-forumofficial-certification/ipv6-forum-network-engineer-silver/network-engineer-silverintroduction/differences-between-ipv4-and-ipv6 > [Accessed on: 22 October 2014]

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