Introduction

The explosion of Internet growth has created a severe depletion of the current Internet Protocol v4 (IPv4) address space. The current IPv4 address space mainly serves the address requirements for the PC computer market in today s service provider and enterprise business markets. However, the development of new markets has required networks to support an increasing variety of network attachments, including mobile IP elements such as wireless and infrared devices and IP phones. This expansion of the market drives the need for a substantially larger IP address space. Routing and addressing using the IPv4 address space has become increasingly constrained, and as the Internet has grown, inefficiencies have arisen in the capability to deploy a hierarchal infrastructure that promotes address aggregation. The utilization of Classless Inter-Domain Routing (CIDR) has extended the lifetime of the IPv4 address space considerably, but it is increasingly evident that the current IPv4 address space will be depleted in the near future. IPv6 represents the next generation of Internet protocol that can meet both the current addressing requirements and those generated by emerging markets.

IPv6 addresses are much different from IPv4 addresses from both an addressing structure and aggregation and routing functionality. These differences require designers of supporting protocols to re-design the operations of the protocols. The mapping of addresses to hostnames via the Domain Name System (DNS) has been updated and is becoming increasingly more important as IPv6 starts to become widely used. Management protocols such as Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) will change to...