Learning Python Networking - Second Edition
by José Manuel Ortega, Dr. M. O. Faruque Sarker, Sam Washington
The IPv6 protocol
The history of IPv6 begins with a real need we have today. When IPv4 was conceived, in the 1970s, the creators could not imagine the great success that it would have throughout the world. Due to the lack of addresses, the research team called Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) began to look for a substitute for IPv4, which in principle was called Internet Protocol Next Generation (IPng), but finally took the name of IPv6.
The IPv4 protocol has a 32-bit address space, which means that to calculate the total number of possible addresses, we can do it by taking 2 raised to 32, making a total of 4, 294, 967, 296 addresses.
The IPv6 protocol has expanded the address space to 128 bits, making a total of 340, 282, 366, 920 ...
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