September 2003
Intermediate to advanced
1264 pages
35h 56m
English
The size of an IPv6 address is 128 bits, which is four times larger than an IPv4 address. In theory, the 32-bit address space that IPv4 uses provides 4,294,967,296 possible addresses; however, previous and current allocation practices limit the number of public IPv4 addresses to a few hundred million. By contrast, the 128-bit address space that IPv6 uses provides 3.4 × 1038 possible addresses.
The size of the IPv6 address allows for subdividing the address into a hierarchical routing structure that reflects the current topology of the Internet. This structure provides great flexibility for hierarchical addressing and routing, which the IPv4-based Internet lacks.
IPv4 addresses are represented ...
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