IPv6, the savior of the Internet of Things industry?

On November 26, 2019, all IPv4 addresses were allocated, which means that there are no more IPv4 addresses to be allocated to ISPs and other large network infrastructure providers.

The RIPE NCC, which is responsible for allocating Internet resources in the UK, Europe, the Middle East and parts of Central Asia, announced that its last reserve pool of IPv4 address space was completely exhausted at 15:35 UTC+1 on November 25.

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Theoretically, IPv4 address exhaustion means that no new devices can be connected to the Internet. There are currently several ways to mitigate this situation:

• ISPs reuse and recycle unused IPv4 addresses;
• Network Address Translation Technology
• Transition from IPv4 to IPv6

Here are some advantages of IPv6:

Larger address space

IPv4 uses a 32-bit address length, which can provide us with 2^32, or about 4.3 billion addresses, while IPv6 uses a 128-bit address length, which provides us with 2^128 addresses. It can be said that there are no restrictions on the addresses provided. A conservative estimate of the actual addresses that can be allocated by IPv6 is that more than 1,000 addresses can still be allocated per square meter of the entire earth. It is no coincidence that it is possible to assign an IP address to every grain of sand in the world.

Faster transfer speeds

IPv6 uses a fixed header, unlike IPv4 which carries a bunch of lengthy data. The short header improves the efficiency of network data forwarding. And because IPv6 has a smaller routing table and stronger aggregation capability, it ensures that the data forwarding path is shorter, greatly improving the forwarding efficiency. IPv6 also eliminates most of the common address conflicts in IPv4 and provides more simplified connections and communications for devices.

More secure transmission method

IPv4 has never been considered secure. Although more and more websites are turning on SSL, there are still a large number of websites that do not use HTTPS. However, IPv6 is built on a secure basis from beginning to end. It authenticates and encrypts data at the network layer and verifies IP packets, providing users with data security from client to server and ensuring that data is not hijacked.

In addition to the above, compared with IPv4, IPv6 is more friendly to mobile terminals. It can enhance the mobility, security and routing characteristics of mobile terminals, while reducing the difficulty and investment of network deployment. IPv6 adds automatic configuration and reconfiguration technology, plug and play, and automatically adds, deletes and updates configuration for information such as IP addresses, improving the manageability of IPv6.