Running IPv6 2006

IPv6

The Internet Protocol (IP) is the most successful network protocol in the history of network protocols. Not only is all the information that flows over the Internet contained in packets that conform to the Internet Protocol, IP has also driven out of the marketplace the other protocols that were used in private networks during the last two decades of the previous century. Today a non-IP computer network is almost unthinkable. So what kind of new protocol could possi­bly challenge IP’s supremacy?

A new version of IP of course.

And that’s exactly what IPv6 (Internet Protocol version 6) is: the next step in the natural evolution of the Internet Protocol. In case a new version of IP was ever needed, the designers of the original IP included a field that contains a version number in the packet layout. This way, there would never be a risk that the contents of a data packet would be misinterpreted, because the receiver assumes a different version of the Internet Protocol than the one used by the sender. Today’s IP sets the version number in each packet to 4, making it IPv4. Version numbers 1, 2, and 3 were left unused. The lowest and highest possible values (0 and 15 for the IP version number) are traditionally reserved. IP version number 5 was allocated to a non-IP protocol that had to coexist with IP under some circumstances, so 6 was the logical choice for the next-generation IP1

IPv6—Why?

In the mid-1980s, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) was created to provide a setting where the people who built and ran Internet-related networks or network equipment could interact. Over the years, the IETF has evolved into a standards organization, but it’s still very different from other standards organizations such as the ANSI, IEEE, ITU-T, or ETSI. The most fundamental difference is that other standards organizations charge for membership and for the standards documents themselves. Within the IETF, on the other hand, anyone can partici­pate through email and obtain RFC documents for free. Most of the work is done through email, so even those who can’t afford traveling to the IETF meetings that are held three times a year can participate. This directly leads to another peculiar aspect of the IETF: because membership is open, it makes little sense to arrive at decisions through voting, so the IETF works by “rough consensus.” Nobody really knows for sure what “rough consensus” means, but the rough consensus is that it’s somewhere between a majority and unanimity. As the IETF motto, coined by Dave Clark, puts it: “We reject presidents, kings, and voting; we believe in rough consensus and running code.”

Work inside the IETF is done in working groups (wgs). The working groups are organized into areas such as Routing, Security and Operations, and Management. Each area has two area directors, and the area directors, together with the IETF chair, make up the Internet Engineer­ing Steering Group (IESG). The IESG is the IETF’s governing body. There is also the Internet Architecture Board (IAB), which has close ties to the IETF and overlooks the Internet architec­ture. The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) keeps track of protocol numbers, and the RFC Editor publishes IETF standards and other documents as “RFCs” (see Appendix A for more information). The IESG and IAB members don’t receive compensation for their work, but the IETF has a small secretariat that provides administrative support to the IESG.

In the early 1990s, the IETF realized that the IPv4 address space was running out at a dan­gerous rate. Around 1990, about one-eighth of the 3.7 billion usable IPv4 addresses was given out, a number that doubled every five years. At this rate, the last IP address would be used up in 2005. This apparently impending doom prompted the IETF to start work on “IP next gener­ation” (IPng), which eventually led to the creating of the IPv6 standard. The first IPv6 RFC was published in 1995 (with many more to come). The main difference between IPv4 and IPv6 is that IPv6 uses addresses that are 128 bits, rather than the 32 bits in IPv4, allowing no less than 3.4 x 1038 individual addresses.

See Appendix A for an overview of the IETF standards process and a list of IPv6-related RFCs.

IPv6 Benefits

When the IETF set out to create “IPng,” the Internet Protocol next generation, it took advantage of this opportunity to improve on IPv4 wherever possible.

More Address Space

Still, the most obvious and most important advantage of IPv6 is that the addresses are longer, which makes for a much, much larger address space. The actual number of individual addresses that is possible with 128 bits goes beyond numbers anyone except astronomers and particle physicists is familiar with:
340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456

The number of possible IPv4 addresses seems mundane by comparison:
4,294,967,296

The 128-bit address space is large enough to have 155 billion IPv4 Internets on every square millimeter of the Earth’s surface, including the oceans. In U.S. measurements, the figure is even bigger: it’s enough to supply every square inch of the Earth’s surface with the equivalent of a hundred trillion IPv4 Internets. Or what if the amount of address space used would really have doubled every five years for years to come, rather than level off around the turn of the millennium? Even at this incredible exponential rate, the IPv6 address space would last until the year 2485.

The original goal of providing more address space to avoid running out of addresses altogether isn’t as urgent as it once was, because IPv4 addresses are no longer used up at an exponential rate. There may even be enough IPv4 addresses for decades to come, although that’s certainly a dangerous assumption to make. On the other hand, there aren’t even enough IPv4 addresses for each person on Earth to have just one, and North America and Europe already use many more than a single address per person. So while the exact moment when the IPv4 address space will run out remains a topic for heated debate, it’s obvious that at some point it will.
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