Cartoon | IPv6 makes every grain of sand under your feet unique

I am an ordinary grain of sand in the vast sea of ​​sand.

If humans want to find me accurately,

That's definitely... no way!

Of course.

I guess no one will want to do such boring things for the time being.

But who can say for sure what will happen in the future?

But I also know,

In the future, every grain of sand will have the opportunity to have an address.

Just like humans can identify an address with a specific house number,

is unique.

With this address,

We can also be considered as sand with status.

If someone asks this question:

Is your address also 602, Unit 1, Building D, XX City, XX Province?

That is definitely not the case!

Our address representation method is slightly unique.

It is a combination of numbers + letters.

In fact, the address we use is the IP address that everyone often hears about.

It is a concept in the IP protocol.

Every grain of sand wants to have an identity in the online world.

To have such an address,

This is easy to understand.

Don't you humans also need a delivery address when sending express delivery?

Every Internet-connected device that wants to receive data must have an IP address.

The so-called IP address refers to:

Sand is not assigned an IP address.

There may be two reasons:

The fact that IP addresses are limited has to do with IPv4.

IPv4 stands for Internet Protocol version 4.

It can be understood as the "fourth generation ID card" of networked computers.

It is the core of the Internet.

It is also the most widely used version of the Internet Protocol to date.

The total number of IPv4 addresses is 2 to the power of 32.

That is about 4.29 billion.

Why is it 2 to the power of 32?

Because the IPv4 address format is

With the explosive growth of connected devices around the world,

The IPv4 address pool is starting to run out.

It is simply unable to meet the needs of Internet development.

People are in urgent need of a higher version of the IP protocol.

Larger pool of IP addresses.

This sounds a bit like upgrading your landline number.

Today,

I believe many people still remember this scene vividly!

Until one day last year,

The European Network Coordination Center (RIPE NCC) issued an email,

Officially announced that the global IPv4 address is exhausted.

IPv4 is about to exit the stage of history.

This also means that IPv6 will officially take over this mission.

Continue to fulfill the great networking mission.

The so-called IPv6,

As the name suggests, it is Internet Protocol version 6.

It is the next generation version of IPv4.

In fact, it is not a new thing.

It was born as early as the 1990s.

This brings us back to IPv4.

In fact, IANA IPv4 addresses were completely exhausted as early as 2011.

But IPv6 was still in its early stages of deployment.

It's hard to bear this burden!

So we came up with a way to alleviate this conflict.

For example, Internet service providers can reuse and recycle unused IPv4 addresses;

You can also use the Network Address Translation (NAT) method.

Use the same IP address privately behind your ISP router.

It is like connecting many private networks under one public network.

When connected to the outside world,

Everyone put on the "vest" of the public network again,

In this way,

One public network address can be used by dozens or even hundreds of computers.

This is why it was not officially announced until last year.

There is no other way to solve the IPv4 resource problem.

This is enough to show the importance of steady advancement of IPv6.

Compared with IPv4,

The number of IPv6 address pools is 2 to the power of 128.

Probably this much:

340282366920938463463374607431768211456

How did this quantity value come from?

It is still determined by the length of its address bits.

If written in binary,

The IPv6 address is 128 bits.

However, for the convenience of expression,

Usually it is shortened to 32 bits in hexadecimal.

Then divide them into 8 groups, 4 in each group.

So a standard, legal IPv6 address looks like this:

2001:0db8:85a3:08d3:1319:8a2e:0370:7344

It is worth noting that

IPv6 addresses can be abbreviated.

Leading zeros in each number can be omitted.

For example, the red "0" can be omitted and become:

Even if there is a group or several consecutive groups of 0,

Then it can be shortened to "::":

In addition to the number of addresses, IPv6 has many advantages, such as:

• Smaller routing tables are used, so routers forward packets faster.
• The addition of enhanced multicast support and flow control is very beneficial for multimedia applications and Quality of Service (QoS) control.
• Added support for automatic configuration. This is an improvement and extension of the DHCP protocol, making network (especially LAN) management more convenient and faster.
• Higher security: Users can encrypt data at the network layer and verify IP messages, greatly enhancing network security.
• It has better scalability. If new technologies or applications require it, IPV6 allows the protocol to be expanded.
• With a better header format, IPV6 uses a new header format, which simplifies and speeds up the routing selection process and improves efficiency.

Final Thoughts

With more than ten years of development, IPv6 has been supported by many communication network and terminal equipment manufacturers and has made great progress.

IPv6 can directly solve the current problem of the number of IoT devices, and a large number of IoT terminal devices will also have new "door numbers" - based on the multi-address nature of the IPv6 protocol, thus realizing private network connections. However, IPv6 is not without "defects":

• Although IPv6 is the next generation Internet communication protocol, due to the time issue, the development of IPv6 protocol still lacks specific commercial applications. In the future, IPv6 will still coexist with IPv4.
• Due to the asymmetry between IPv6 and IPv4, the diversity of transition forms, and other issues, data transitioning from IPv4 to IPv6 will face more complex security issues;
• Since the basic mechanism of IPv6 and IPv4 datagram transmission has not changed, attacks that occur in the other four layers of the IPv4 network except the IP layer will still exist in the IPv6 network;
• Due to the lack of large-scale practice and in-depth research, the actual security protection capabilities of IPv6 are still unclear.

Under this series of problems, how IPv6 will be solved and repaired will be a problem that must be solved in the era of the Internet of Things.