Designed to overcome an insufficient number of valid addresses for network hosts, IPv6 was first introduced in 1998, though it was only accepted as a formal standard in 2017 (which goes to show how diligent engineers can be about defining standards). The new specification was written to deal with a small number of issues presented by IPv4, including the limited address space. The standard also has native support for multicast transmission, as well as IP security (IPSec) security features.
IPv6 – the future of the protocol
The IPv6 addressing scheme
Where IPv4 had a 32-bit addressing mechanism, allowing for a maximum of about 4.3 billion unique addresses, the IPv6 standard provides a 128-bit addressing scheme, allowing...
