Chapter 1. IPv6 Versus IPv4
IPv6 is sometimes called the Next Generation Internet Protocol, or IPng. Even though the Internet is seen as a relatively new technology, the protocols and technologies that make it work were developed in the 1970s and 1980s. The current Internet and all our corporate and private intranets use IPv4. Now, with IPv6, the first major upgrade of the Internet protocol suite is on the horizon or maybe even closer. Close enough, anyway, to start taking it seriously.
The History of IPv6
The effort to develop a successor protocol to IPv4 was started in the early 1990s by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). Several parallel efforts began simultaneously, all trying to solve the foreseen address space limitation as well as provide additional functionality. The IETF started the IPng area in 1993 to investigate the different proposals and to make recommendations for further procedures.
The IPng area directors of the IETF recommended the creation of IPv6 at the Toronto IETF meeting in 1994. Their recommendation is specified in RFC 1752, “The Recommendation for the IP Next Generation Protocol.” The Directors formed an Address Lifetime Expectation (ALE) working group, whose job was to determine whether the expected lifetime for IPv4 would allow the development of a protocol with new functionality or if the remaining time would only allow for developing an address space solution. In 1994, the ALE working group projected the IPv4 address exhaustion to occur sometime ...