comparison of IPv4 and IPv6
Galal Abdo Awad Murshed, Dan Komosný
Department of Telecommunications
Brno University of Technology, Faculty of Electrical Engineering and
Communications
Purkyňova 118, 612 00 Brno, Czech Republic
Abstract
The new version of Internet Protocol IPv6 (Internet Protocol Version 6) is an improved version of the Internet Protocol. The improved characteristics of IPv6 resolve and overcome many of the serious limitations of the current Internet protocol IPv4. These improved characteristics of IPv6 make the IP Internet protocol run efficiently and faster on Internet Network. This paper describes some of these characteristics and discusses the delay measurements of IPv6 and IPv4.
1 Introduction
IPv6, which is also called the next generation
Internet protocol (IPng), was recommended by the IPng Area Directions of the
Internet Engineering Task Force at the Toronto Ietf meeting on July 25,1994 in
RFC 1752 [7].
IPv4 has been working fine for a long time (about 30 years). It uses 32-bit
addresses, which provide for about 4 billion addresses (more than the world’s
population at that time).
By the late 1980s more organizations, research institutes, and universities had
connected to the Internet. The number of hosts increased dramatically in 1993
with the release of GUI (Graphical User Interface) browsers for HTML (HyperText
Markup Language). With the World Wide Web and e-mail, the number of users
continually increases and the number of free addresses of IPv4 gets lower. Also,
IPv4 cannot provide one address for each person on the earth (the number of
population is now about 6 billion). So IPv6 is designed to solve the limited
address space and other limitations of the current version of IPv4 such as
security, auto-configuration, extensibility, and peer-to-peer and mobile
applications and the like.
IPv6 has many advantages compared with the older Internet protocol IPv4. The
most useful advantages of IPv6 are address space extended from 32 bits to 128
bits, and simplified header format for efficient packet handling.
Processing packets of IPv6 by routers is easier than processing packets of IPv4,
because the hardware program knows in advance that the coming header is static
in length. Thus the packet processing speed increases.
2 IPV4/IPV6 comparison
2.1 Header comparison
The main characteristic of IPv6 is its large address space. In IPv4 there are
only 232 possible ways how to represent the address (about 4 billion
possible addresses), but in IPv6 there are 2128 possible way (about
3,4*1038 possible addresses) [2].
