IPv6 Essentials, 3rd Edition

Foreword

Vint Cerf

Internet Pioneer, Woodhurst, February 2014

It is no exaggeration to say that the Internet has become an integral part of the lives of nearly three billion people on the planet. More important, it touches nearly everyone thanks to the ramifications of transactions, information exchange, and other Internet-based applications that produce indirect effects. The original Internet Protocol provided for a maximum of 4.3 billion terminal identifiers (addresses). This limit was stretched using a mechanism called Network Address Translation that permitted multiple parties to use private address space that would not be exposed in the public Internet but rather translated into a shared, publicly routable IPv4 address. The IPv4 address space was exhausted at the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) in February 2011, leaving Regional Internet Registries to deal with the allocation of their remaining address space. IPv6 was developed in the mid-1990s and standardized by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). It has provision for 340 trillion trillion trillion addresses. Its implementation has been slow, but two milestones are triggering an increased rate of uptake. One is the running out of the IPv4 address space. The other is the growing demand for Internet addresses to be assigned to mobiles, set-top boxes, automobiles, and literally tens of billions of other programmable devices. This is the so-called Internet of Things.

In addition to satisfying ...