Internet Protocol Version 6 (IPv6) Any information presented about IP Version 6 (IPv6) will not be complete without talking about IP Version 4 (IPv4), its predecessor. For completeness, a brief introduction to IPv4 will be made. In networking computers and devices, the Internet Protocol (IP) plays a very important role. IP, found at the Internet layer of the Department of Defense (DoD) model, provides the means for devices to communicate using logical addresses called IP addresses. The importance of an IP address for communication will be felt in the analogy of surface mail. How would it be possible to send a letter to someone whose address we don't know? The IP address allows us to know the origin of a packet and the destination for correct delivery by the IP protocol. IPv6 Motivation The development of IPv6 is motivated by the inadequacies of its predecessor IPv4. IPv4 is an addressing scheme that uses 32 bits in groups of 8 bits each to identify a device. Each address represents a number in the decimal range 0 to 255 in each of the four octets that represent it. Due to the 32-bit address size, the maximum number of usable IPv4 addresses is therefore limited to 232, or approximately 4.3 billion addresses (4,294,967,296). For an addressing scheme that was intended only as a test of the networking concept, the possibility of its exhaustion was remote. However, the reality of running out of available IPv4 addresses due to the astronomical increase in the number of people and devices on the Internet needing IPv4 addresses gave rise to the development of IPv6. IPv6 StructureIPv6 is a routable protocol responsible for addressing, routing and fragmenting packets within the......middle of paper......ter. Devices that do not support IPv6 may only require a firmware update with the new IPv6 stack if the equipment manufacturer provides it. Or, such equipment will have to be completely replaced with new one that supports IPv6. Your software can support both IPv4 and IPv6. Most recent versions of major operating systems have implemented and supported the use of IPv6 in their operating systems. The Windows operating system, however, does not fully support IPv6 despite Microsoft's push for its adoption. Using the full colon of the IPv6 IP address in a browser's address bar will make the operating system think it is a reference to a drive. The tricky way to get around this is to use a domain translation where the colons are replaced with hyphens and the ".ipv6.literal.net" characters must be added to the end of the address.