The Future of the Internet: IPv6
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Introduction
The internet has originall created in .... by .... for sharing information easily between researchers in different parts of the world. It was then adapted as a mean of communication for the United States military. It was not until the early 1990's that the internet as we know it began to emerge. As the internet grew and gained popularity new uses and applications were created to use in conjunction with the initial infastructure. The internet now has ..... billion users and is used everyday for e-mail, e-commerce, communication and media sharing. Even though the original infastucture was not craeted with the intention of supporting these functionalities it has been amazing resiliant in it's uses. However, changes will be nessisary in the near future to support this exponential growth. IPv6 was created to solve many of the current underlying problems.
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What is IPv6
IPv6 stands for Internet Protocol version 6. It is the successor to IPv4 which is currently the backbone of the internet infastructure. The Internet Protocol is the dominant network layer protocol on the intertnet. It is used along with other higher level protocols such as TCP and UDP to create connections across the internet to enable inforation sharing. It would make logical sense to assume thay IPv5 would be the successor to IPv4, but IPv5 was created as an internet stream protocol for audio and video. The project was never widely distributed and now we are wait for IPv6 to emerge as the standard.
Why Create IPv6
The IPng (Internet Protocol next generation) was established in 1994 to create a new protocol that would solve some of the issues that plauge IPv4. The main improvments to IPv6 would be an increased address space. IPv4 uses 32-bit addressing scheme which allows for 2^32 unique addresses. Each machine attached to the internet requires a unique IP address, with an increasing number of people and machines using the internet these addresses will eventually be exhausted. IPv6 not only corrects the lack of address space it also enhances routing efficency, increases bandwidth capabilities and provides better security.
