Abstract
The Internet is one of the greatest revolutionary innovations of the twentieth century. It made the 'global village Utopia a reality in a rather short span of time. It is changing the way we interact with each other, the way we do business, the way we educate ourselves and even the way we entertain ourselves. Perhaps even the architects of Internet would not have foreseen the tremendous growth rate of the network being witnessed today.
Description of Ipv6 - The Next Generation Protocol
IPv6 is sometimes also called the Next Generation Internet Protocol or IPng. IPv6 was recommended by the IPng Area Directors of the Internet Engineering Task Force at the Toronto IETF meeting on July 25, 1994 in RFC 1752, The Recommendation for the IP Next Generation Protocol. The recommendation was approved by the Internet Engineering Steering Group and made a Proposed Standard on November 17,1994. The core set of IPv6 protocols were made an IETF Draft Standard on August 10, 1998.
Internet Protocol Version 6 is abbreviated to IPv6 (where the "6" refers to it being assigned version number 6). The previous version of the Internet Protocol is version 4 (referred to as IPv4).
Provider-Based Address Format
Notice the hierarchical structure of this address format. The first level is identified by the registry ID. The next level identifies the Internet service provider that is responsible for assigning the subscriber IDs. Finally, each subscriber assigns the addresses according to the subnet IDs and interface IDs.
The local addresses are used for a collection of hosts that do not want to connect to the global Internet because of security and privacy concerns. There are two types of local addresses: link-local addresses and site-local addresses. The link-local addresses are used for a single link, while the site-local addresses are used for a single site. The local addresses are designed so that when an organization decides to connect the hosts to the global Internet, the move will be as painless as possible.
IPv6 Security
The current Internet has a number of security problems and lacks effective privacy and authentication mechanisms below the application layer. IPv6 remedies these shortcomings by having two integrated options that provide security services. These two options may be used singly or together to provide differing levels of security to different users. This is very important because different user communities have different security needs.
