Exploring IPv6

Early on, scientists realized that IPv4's 32-bit address space would be exhausted. Although no one had an exact date, plans were made to replace IPv4 with an improved version, IPv6. In 1998, the RFC for IPv6 was published and can be found at https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2460.txt.

IPv6 has a number of enhancements, including the following.

• Streamlined header: The header has fewer fields; however, it is larger, mainly due to the expanded address space.
• Flow label: In IPv6, there is a flow label. The field value is available for identifying streams that require specialized treatment, such as real-time traffic.
• Support for extensions and options: While IPv4 can add options, IPv6 does so with greater ease. IPv6 provides the ability to add options, such as fragmentation, which has parameters to fragment the data, and hop-by-hop, which ensures that all devices in the path read the option.

The IPv6 header has room for larger address spaces. However...