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IPv4

Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4) is the first version of the Internet Protocol (IP) as a standalone specification. It is one of the core protocols of standards-based internetworking methods in the Internet and other packet-switched networks. IPv4 was the first version deployed for production on SATNET in 1982 and on the ARPANET in January 1983. It is still used to route most Internet traffic today, even with the ongoing deployment of Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6), its successor.

IPv4 uses a 32-bit address space which provides 4,294,967,296 (232) unique addresses, but large blocks are reserved for special networking purposes.

History
Earlier versions of TCP/IP were a combined specification through TCP/IPv3. With IPv4, the Internet Protocol became a separate specification.

Internet Protocol version 4 is described in IETF publication RFC 791 (September 1981), replacing an earlier definition of January 1980 (RFC 760). In March 1982, the US Department of Defense decided on the Internet Protocol Suite (TCP/IP) as the standard for all military computer networking.

Purpose
The Internet Protocol is the protocol that defines and enables internetworking at the internet layer of the Internet Protocol Suite. In essence it forms the Internet. It uses a logical addressing system and performs routing, which is the forwarding of packets from a source host to the next router that is one hop closer to the intended destination host on another network.

IPv4 is a connectionless protocol, and operates on a best-effort delivery model, in that it does not guarantee delivery, nor does it assure proper sequencing or avoidance of duplicate delivery. These aspects, including data integrity, are addressed by an upper layer transport protocol, such as the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP).

Addressing
IPv4 uses 32-bit addresses which limits the address space to 4 294  967  296 (232) addresses.

IPv4 reserves special address blocks for private networks (224 + 220 + 216 ≈ 18 million addresses) and multicast addresses (228 ≈ 268 million addresses).

Address representations
IPv4 addresses may be represented in any notation expressing a 32-bit integer value. They are most often written in dot-decimal notation, which consists of four octets of the address expressed individually in decimal numbers and separated by periods.

For example, the quad-dotted IP address in the illustration represents the 32-bit decimal number 2886794753, which in hexadecimal format is 0xAC10FE01.

CIDR notation combines the address with its routing prefix in a compact format, in which the address is followed by a slash character (/) and the count of leading consecutive 1 bits in the routing prefix (subnet mask).

Other address representations were in common use when classful networking was practiced. For example, the loopback address was commonly written as, given that it belongs to a class-A network with eight bits for the network mask and 24 bits for the host number. When fewer than four numbers were specified in the address in dotted notation, the last value was treated as an integer of as many bytes as are required to fill out the address to four octets. Thus, the address is equivalent to.

Allocation
In the original design of IPv4, an IP address was divided into two parts: the network identifier was the most significant octet of the address, and the host identifier was the rest of the address. The latter was also called the rest field. This structure permitted a maximum of 256 network identifiers, which was quickly found to be inadequate.

To overcome this limit, the most-significant address octet was redefined in 1981 to create network classes, in a system which later became known as classful networking. The revised system defined five classes. Classes A, B, and C had different bit lengths for network identification. The rest of the address was used as previously to identify a host within a network. Because of the different sizes of fields in different classes, each network class had a different capacity for addressing hosts. In addition to the three classes for addressing hosts, Class D was defined for multicast addressing and Class E was reserved for future applications.

Dividing existing classful networks into subnets began in 1985 with the publication of. This division was made more flexible with the introduction of variable-length subnet masks (VLSM) in in 1987. In 1993, based on this work, introduced Classless Inter-Domain Routing (CIDR), which expressed the number of bits (from the most significant) as, for instance,, and the class-based scheme was dubbed classful, by contrast. CIDR was designed to permit repartitioning of any address space so that smaller or larger blocks of addresses could be allocated to users. The hierarchical structure created by CIDR is managed by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) and the regional Internet registries (RIRs). Each RIR maintains a publicly searchable WHOIS database that provides information about IP address assignments.

Special-use addresses
The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and IANA have restricted from general use various reserved IP addresses for special purposes. Notably these addresses are used for multicast traffic and to provide addressing space for unrestricted uses on private networks.
 * {|class="wikitable sortable"

!Address block !Address range !Number of addresses !Scope !Description
 * +Special address blocks
 * 0.0.0.0/8
 * 0.0.0.0–0.255.255.255
 * align=right|$16,777,216$
 * Software
 * Current (local, "this") network
 * 10.0.0.0/8
 * 10.0.0.0–10.255.255.255
 * align=right|$16,777,216$
 * Private network
 * Used for local communications within a private network
 * Private network
 * Used for local communications within a private network

 * 100.64.0.0/10
 * 100.64.0.0–100.127.255.255
 * align=right|$4,194,304$
 * Private network
 * Shared address space for communications between a service provider and its subscribers when using a carrier-grade NAT
 * 127.0.0.0/8
 * 127.0.0.0–127.255.255.255
 * align=right|$16,777,216$
 * Host
 * Used for loopback addresses to the local host
 * Used for loopback addresses to the local host

 * 169.254.0.0/16
 * 169.254.0.0–169.254.255.255
 * align=right|$65,536$
 * Subnet
 * Used for link-local addresses between two hosts on a single link when no IP address is otherwise specified, such as would have normally been retrieved from a DHCP server
 * 172.16.0.0/12
 * 172.16.0.0–172.31.255.255
 * align=right|$1,048,576$
 * Private network
 * Used for local communications within a private network
 * Used for local communications within a private network

 * 192.0.0.0/24
 * 192.0.0.0–192.0.0.255
 * align=right|$256$
 * Private network
 * IETF Protocol Assignments, DS-Lite (/29)
 * 192.0.2.0/24
 * 192.0.2.0–192.0.2.255
 * align=right|$256$
 * Documentation
 * Assigned as TEST-NET-1, documentation and examples
 * 192.88.99.0/24
 * 192.88.99.0–192.88.99.255
 * align=right|$256$
 * Internet
 * Reserved. Formerly used for IPv6 to IPv4 relay (included IPv6 address block 2002::/16).
 * 192.168.0.0/16
 * 192.168.0.0–192.168.255.255
 * align=right|$65,536$
 * Private network
 * Used for local communications within a private network
 * 198.18.0.0/15
 * 198.18.0.0–198.19.255.255
 * align=right|$131,072$
 * Private network
 * Used for benchmark testing of inter-network communications between two separate subnets
 * 198.51.100.0/24
 * 198.51.100.0–198.51.100.255
 * align=right|$256$
 * Documentation
 * Assigned as TEST-NET-2, documentation and examples
 * 203.0.113.0/24
 * 203.0.113.0–203.0.113.255
 * align=right|$256$
 * Documentation
 * Assigned as TEST-NET-3, documentation and examples
 * Assigned as TEST-NET-2, documentation and examples
 * 203.0.113.0/24
 * 203.0.113.0–203.0.113.255
 * align=right|$268,435,456$
 * Documentation
 * Assigned as TEST-NET-3, documentation and examples
 * Assigned as TEST-NET-3, documentation and examples

 * 224.0.0.0/4
 * 224.0.0.0–239.255.255.255
 * align=right|$256$
 * Internet
 * In use for multicast (former Class D network)
 * 233.252.0.0/24
 * 233.252.0.0–233.252.0.255
 * align=right|$268,435,455$
 * Documentation
 * Assigned as MCAST-TEST-NET, documentation and examples (Note that this is part of the above multicast space.)
 * 240.0.0.0/4
 * 240.0.0.0–255.255.255.254
 * align=right|$1$
 * Internet
 * Reserved for future use (former Class E network)
 * 255.255.255.255/32
 * 255.255.255.255
 * align=right|$16,777,216$
 * Subnet
 * Reserved for the "limited broadcast" destination address
 * }
 * Subnet
 * Reserved for the "limited broadcast" destination address
 * }

Private networks
Of the approximately four billion addresses defined in IPv4, about 18 million addresses in three ranges are reserved for use in private networks. Packets addresses in these ranges are not routable in the public Internet; they are ignored by all public routers. Therefore, private hosts cannot directly communicate with public networks, but require network address translation at a routing gateway for this purpose.
 * {|class=wikitable

!Name!!CIDR block!!Address range!!Number of addresses!!Classful description
 * +Reserved private IPv4 network ranges
 * 24-bit block||10.0.0.0/8||10.0.0.0 – 10.255.255.255||align=right|$1,048,576$||Single Class A
 * 20-bit block||172.16.0.0/12||172.16.0.0 – 172.31.255.255||align=right|$65,536$||Contiguous range of 16 Class B blocks
 * 16-bit block||192.168.0.0/16||192.168.0.0 – 192.168.255.255||align=right|⇭⇭⇭||Contiguous range of 256 Class C blocks
 * }
 * 16-bit block||192.168.0.0/16||192.168.0.0 – 192.168.255.255||align=right|⇭⇭⇭||Contiguous range of 256 Class C blocks
 * }
 * }

Since two private networks, e.g., two branch offices, cannot directly interoperate via the public Internet, the two networks must be bridged across the Internet via a virtual private network (VPN) or an IP tunnel, which encapsulates packets, including their headers containing the private addresses, in a protocol layer during transmission across the public network. Additionally, encapsulated packets may be encrypted for transmission across public networks to secure the data.

Link-local addressing
RFC 3927 defines the special address block 169.254.0.0/16 for link-local addressing. These addresses are only valid on the link (such as a local network segment or point-to-point connection) directly connected to a host that uses them. These addresses are not routable. Like private addresses, these addresses cannot be the source or destination of packets traversing the internet. These addresses are primarily used for address autoconfiguration (Zeroconf) when a host cannot obtain an IP address from a DHCP server or other internal configuration methods.

When the address block was reserved, no standards existed for address autoconfiguration. Microsoft created an implementation called Automatic Private IP Addressing (APIPA), which was deployed on millions of machines and became a de facto standard. Many years later, in May 2005, the IETF defined a formal standard in RFC 3927, entitled Dynamic Configuration of IPv4 Link-Local Addresses.

Loopback
The class A network (classless network ) is reserved for loopback. IP packets whose source addresses belong to this network should never appear outside a host. Packets received on a non-loopback interface with a loopback source or destination address must be dropped.

First and last subnet addresses
The first address in a subnet is used to identify the subnet itself. In this address all host bits are 0. To avoid ambiguity in representation, this address is reserved. The last address has all host bits set to 1. It is used as a local broadcast address for sending messages to all devices on the subnet simultaneously. For networks of size or larger, the broadcast address always ends in 255.

For example, in the subnet (subnet mask ) the identifier  is used to refer to the entire subnet. The broadcast address of the network is.

However, this does not mean that every address ending in 0 or 255 cannot be used as a host address. For example, in the subnet, which is equivalent to the address range –, the broadcast address is. One can use the following addresses for hosts, even though they end with 255:, , etc. Also, is the network identifier and must not be assigned to an interface. The addresses, , etc., may be assigned, despite ending with 0.

In the past, conflict between network addresses and broadcast addresses arose because some software used non-standard broadcast addresses with zeros instead of ones.

In networks smaller than, broadcast addresses do not necessarily end with 255. For example, a CIDR subnet has the broadcast address.

As a special case, a network has capacity for just two hosts. These networks are typically used for point-to-point connections. There is no network identifier or broadcast address for these networks.

Address resolution
Hosts on the Internet are usually known by names, e.g., www.example.com, not primarily by their IP address, which is used for routing and network interface identification. The use of domain names requires translating, called resolving, them to addresses and vice versa. This is analogous to looking up a phone number in a phone book using the recipient's name.

The translation between addresses and domain names is performed by the Domain Name System (DNS), a hierarchical, distributed naming system that allows for the subdelegation of namespaces to other DNS servers.

Unnumbered interface
A unnumbered point-to-point (PtP) link, also called a transit link, is a link that does not have an IP network or subnet number associated with it, but still has an IP address. First introduced in 1993, Phil Karn from Qualcomm is credited as the original designer.

The purpose of a transit link is to route datagrams. They are used to free IP addresses from a scarce IP address space or to reduce the management of assigning IP and configuration of interfaces. Previously, every link needed to dedicate a or  subnet using 2 or 4 IP addresses per point-to-point link. When a link is unnumbered, a router-id is used, a single IP address borrowed from a defined (normally a loopback) interface. The same router-id can be used on multiple interfaces.

One of the disadvantages of unnumbered interfaces is that it is harder to do remote testing and management.

Address space exhaustion
In the 1980s, it became apparent that the pool of available IPv4 addresses was depleting at a rate that was not initially anticipated in the original design of the network. The main market forces that accelerated address depletion included the rapidly growing number of Internet users, who increasingly used mobile computing devices, such as laptop computers, personal digital assistants (PDAs), and smart phones with IP data services. In addition, high-speed Internet access was based on always-on devices. The threat of exhaustion motivated the introduction of a number of remedial technologies, such as: By the mid-1990s, NAT was used pervasively in network access provider systems, along with strict usage-based allocation policies at the regional and local Internet registries.
 * Classless Inter-Domain Routing (CIDR), for smaller ISP allocations
 * Unnumbered interfaces removed the need for addresses on transit links.
 * Network address translation (NAT) removed the need for the end-to-end principle.

The primary address pool of the Internet, maintained by IANA, was exhausted on 3 February 2011, when the last five blocks were allocated to the five RIRs. APNIC was the first RIR to exhaust its regional pool on 15 April 2011, except for a small amount of address space reserved for the transition technologies to IPv6, which is to be allocated under a restricted policy.

The long-term solution to address exhaustion was the 1998 specification of a new version of the Internet Protocol, IPv6. It provides a vastly increased address space, but also allows improved route aggregation across the Internet, and offers large subnetwork allocations of a minimum of 264 host addresses to end users. However, IPv4 is not directly interoperable with IPv6, so that IPv4-only hosts cannot directly communicate with IPv6-only hosts. With the phase-out of the 6bone experimental network starting in 2004, permanent formal deployment of IPv6 commenced in 2006. Completion of IPv6 deployment is expected to take considerable time, so that intermediate transition technologies are necessary to permit hosts to participate in the Internet using both versions of the protocol.

Packet structure
An IP packet consists of a header section and a data section. An IP packet has no data checksum or any other footer after the data section. Typically the link layer encapsulates IP packets in frames with a CRC footer that detects most errors, many transport-layer protocols carried by IP also have their own error checking.

Header
The IPv4 packet header consists of 14 fields, of which 13 are required. The 14th field is optional and aptly named: options. The fields in the header are packed with the most significant byte first (network byte order), and for the diagram and discussion, the most significant bits are considered to come first (MSB 0 bit numbering). The most significant bit is numbered 0, so the version field is actually found in the four most significant bits of the first byte, for example.

 * Version
 * The first header field in an IP packet is the four-bit version field. For IPv4, this is always equal to 4.

 * Internet Header Length (IHL)
 * The IPv4 header is variable in size due to the optional 14th field (options). The IHL field contains the size of the IPv4 header; it has 4 bits that specify the number of 32-bit words in the header. The minimum value for this field is 5, which indicates a length of 5 × 32 bits = 160 bits = 20 bytes. As a 4-bit field, the maximum value is 15; this means that the maximum size of the IPv4 header is 15 × 32 bits = 480 bits = 60 bytes.

 * Differentiated Services Code Point (DSCP)
 * Originally defined as the type of service (ToS), this field specifies differentiated services (DiffServ). Real-time data streaming makes use of the DSCP field. An example is Voice over IP (VoIP), which is used for interactive voice services.

 * Explicit Congestion Notification (ECN)
 * This field allows end-to-end notification of network congestion without dropping packets. ECN is an optional feature available when both endpoints support it and effective when also supported by the underlying network.

 * Total Length
 * This 16-bit field defines the entire packet size in bytes, including header and data. The minimum size is 20 bytes (header without data) and the maximum is 65,535 bytes. All hosts are required to be able to reassemble datagrams of size up to 576 bytes, but most modern hosts handle much larger packets. Links may impose further restrictions on the packet size, in which case datagrams must be fragmented. Fragmentation in IPv4 is performed in either the sending host or in routers. Reassembly is performed at the receiving host.

 * Identification
 * This field is an identification field and is primarily used for uniquely identifying the group of fragments of a single IP datagram. Some experimental work has suggested using the ID field for other purposes, such as for adding packet-tracing information to help trace datagrams with spoofed source addresses, but any such use is now prohibited.

 * Flags
 * A three-bit field follows and is used to control or identify fragments. They are (in order, from most significant to least significant):
 * bit 0: Reserved; must be zero.
 * bit 1: Don't Fragment (DF)
 * bit 2: More Fragments (MF)
 * If the DF flag is set, and fragmentation is required to route the packet, then the packet is dropped. This can be used when sending packets to a host that does not have resources to perform reassembly of fragments. It can also be used for path MTU discovery, either automatically by the host IP software, or manually using diagnostic tools such as ping or traceroute.
 * For unfragmented packets, the MF flag is cleared. For fragmented packets, all fragments except the last have the MF flag set. The last fragment has a non-zero Fragment Offset field, differentiating it from an unfragmented packet.

 * Fragment offset
 * This field specifies the offset of a particular fragment relative to the beginning of the original unfragmented IP datagram. The fragmentation offset value for the first fragment is always 0. The field is 13 bits wide, so that the offset can be from 0 to 8191 (from (20 – 1) to (213 – 1)). Fragments are specified in units of 8 bytes, which is why fragment length must be a multiple of 8. Therefore, the 13-bit field allows a maximum offset of (213 – 1) × 8 = 65,528 bytes, with the header length included (65,528 + 20 = 65,548 bytes), supporting fragmentation of packets exceeding the maximum IP length of 65,535 bytes.

 * Time to live (TTL)
 * An eight-bit time to live field limits a datagram's lifetime to prevent network failure in the event of a routing loop. It is specified in seconds, but time intervals less than 1 second are rounded up to 1. In practice, the field is used as a hop count—when the datagram arrives at a router, the router decrements the TTL field by one. When the TTL field hits zero, the router discards the packet and typically sends an ICMP time exceeded message to the sender.
 * The program traceroute sends messages with adjusted TTL values and uses these ICMP time exceeded messages to identify the routers traversed by packets from the source to the destination.

 * Protocol
 * This field defines the protocol used in the data portion of the IP datagram. IANA maintains a list of IP protocol numbers.

 * Header checksum
 * The 16-bit IPv4 header checksum field is used for error checking of the header. When a packet arrives at a router or its destination, the network device calculates the checksum of the header including the checksum field. A value of 0xFFFF is expected. If a different result is obtained, the device discards the packet. Errors in the data portion of the packet are handled separately by the encapsulated protocol. Both UDP and TCP have separate checksums that apply to their data.
 * When a packet arrives at a router, the router decreases the TTL field in the header. Consequently, the router must calculate a new header checksum.
 * The checksum field is the 16-bit ones' complement of the ones' complement sum of all 16-bit words in the header. For purposes of computing the checksum, the value of the checksum field is zero.

 * Source address
 * This 32-bit field is the IPv4 address of the sender of the packet. It may be changed in transit by network address translation (NAT).

 * Destination address
 * This 32-bit field is the IPv4 address of the receiver of the packet. It may be affected by NAT.

 * Options
 * The options field is not often used. Packets containing some options may be considered as dangerous by some routers and be blocked. The value in the IHL field must include sufficient extra 32-bit words to hold all options and any padding needed to ensure that the header contains an integral number of 32-bit words. If IHL is greater than 5 (i.e., it is from 6 to 15) it means that the options field is present and must be considered. The list of options may be terminated with the option EOOL (End of Options List, 0x00); this is only necessary if the end of the options would not otherwise coincide with the end of the header.
 * Since most of the IP options include specifications on how many or which intermediate devices the packet should pass, the IP options are not used for communication over the Internet and IP packets including some of the IP options must be dropped as per IPv4 security assessment, since they can expose the network topology or network details.
 * The possible options that can be put in the header are as follows:
 * {|class=wikitable

!Field!!Size (bits)!!Description
 * Copied||1||Set to 1 if the options need to be copied into all fragments of a fragmented packet.
 * Option Class||2||A general options category. 0 is for control options, and 2 is for debugging and measurement. 1 and 3 are reserved.
 * Option Number||5||Specifies an option.
 * Option Length||8||Indicates the size of the entire option (including this field). This field may not exist for simple options.
 * Option Data||Variable||Option-specific data. This field may not exist for simple options.
 * }
 * The table below shows the defined options for IPv4. The Option Type column is derived from the Copied, Option Class, and Option Number bits as defined above.
 * {|class=wikitable style=text-align:center
 * Option Data||Variable||Option-specific data. This field may not exist for simple options.
 * }
 * The table below shows the defined options for IPv4. The Option Type column is derived from the Copied, Option Class, and Option Number bits as defined above.
 * {|class=wikitable style=text-align:center
 * {|class=wikitable style=text-align:center

!Option Type (decimal/hexadecimal)!!Option Name!!Description
 * 0/0x00||EOOL||End of Option List
 * 1/0x01||NOP||No Operation
 * 2/0x02||SEC||Security (defunct)
 * 7/0x07||RR||Record Route
 * 10/0x0A||ZSU||Experimental Measurement
 * 11/0x0B||MTUP||MTU Probe
 * 12/0x0C||MTUR||MTU Reply
 * 15/0x0F||ENCODE||ENCODE
 * 25/0x19||QS||Quick-Start
 * 30/0x1E||EXP||RFC3692-style Experiment
 * 68/0x44||TS||Time Stamp
 * 82/0x52||TR||Traceroute
 * 94/0x5E||EXP||RFC3692-style Experiment
 * 130/0x82||SEC||Security (RIPSO)
 * 131/0x83||LSR||Loose Source Route
 * 133/0x85||E-SEC||Extended Security (RIPSO)
 * 134/0x86||CIPSO||Commercial IP Security Option
 * 136/0x88||SID||Stream ID
 * 137/0x89||SSR||Strict Source Route
 * 142/0x8E||VISA||Experimental Access Control
 * 144/0x90||IMITD||IMI Traffic Descriptor
 * 145/0x91||EIP||Extended Internet Protocol
 * 147/0x93||ADDEXT||Address Extension
 * 148/0x94||RTRALT||Router Alert
 * 149/0x95||SDB||Selective Directed Broadcast
 * 151/0x97||DPS||Dynamic Packet State
 * 152/0x98||UMP||Upstream Multicast Packet
 * 158/0x9E||EXP||RFC3692-style Experiment
 * 205/0xCD||FINN||Experimental Flow Control
 * 222/0xDE||EXP||RFC3692-style Experiment
 * }
 * 133/0x85||E-SEC||Extended Security (RIPSO)
 * 134/0x86||CIPSO||Commercial IP Security Option
 * 136/0x88||SID||Stream ID
 * 137/0x89||SSR||Strict Source Route
 * 142/0x8E||VISA||Experimental Access Control
 * 144/0x90||IMITD||IMI Traffic Descriptor
 * 145/0x91||EIP||Extended Internet Protocol
 * 147/0x93||ADDEXT||Address Extension
 * 148/0x94||RTRALT||Router Alert
 * 149/0x95||SDB||Selective Directed Broadcast
 * 151/0x97||DPS||Dynamic Packet State
 * 152/0x98||UMP||Upstream Multicast Packet
 * 158/0x9E||EXP||RFC3692-style Experiment
 * 205/0xCD||FINN||Experimental Flow Control
 * 222/0xDE||EXP||RFC3692-style Experiment
 * }
 * 148/0x94||RTRALT||Router Alert
 * 149/0x95||SDB||Selective Directed Broadcast
 * 151/0x97||DPS||Dynamic Packet State
 * 152/0x98||UMP||Upstream Multicast Packet
 * 158/0x9E||EXP||RFC3692-style Experiment
 * 205/0xCD||FINN||Experimental Flow Control
 * 222/0xDE||EXP||RFC3692-style Experiment
 * }
 * 158/0x9E||EXP||RFC3692-style Experiment
 * 205/0xCD||FINN||Experimental Flow Control
 * 222/0xDE||EXP||RFC3692-style Experiment
 * }
 * 222/0xDE||EXP||RFC3692-style Experiment
 * }

Data
The packet payload is not included in the checksum. Its contents are interpreted based on the value of the Protocol header field.

List of IP protocol numbers contains a complete list of payload protocol types. Some of the common payload protocols include:

Fragmentation and reassembly
The Internet Protocol enables traffic between networks. The design accommodates networks of diverse physical nature; it is independent of the underlying transmission technology used in the link layer. Networks with different hardware usually vary not only in transmission speed, but also in the maximum transmission unit (MTU). When one network wants to transmit datagrams to a network with a smaller MTU, it may fragment its datagrams. In IPv4, this function was placed at the Internet Layer and is performed in IPv4 routers limiting exposure to these issues by hosts.

In contrast, IPv6, the next generation of the Internet Protocol, does not allow routers to perform fragmentation; hosts must perform Path MTU Discovery before sending datagrams.

Fragmentation
When a router receives a packet, it examines the destination address and determines the outgoing interface to use and that interface's MTU. If the packet size is bigger than the MTU, and the Do not Fragment (DF) bit in the packet's header is set to 0, then the router may fragment the packet.

The router divides the packet into fragments. The maximum size of each fragment is the outgoing MTU minus the IP header size (20 bytes minimum; 60 bytes maximum). The router puts each fragment into its own packet, each fragment packet having the following changes:
 * The total length field is the fragment size.
 * The more fragments (MF) flag is set for all fragments except the last one, which is set to 0.
 * The fragment offset field is set, based on the offset of the fragment in the original data payload. This is measured in units of 8-byte blocks.
 * The header checksum field is recomputed.

For example, for an MTU of 1,500 bytes and a header size of 20 bytes, the fragment offsets would be multiples of $$\frac{1{,}500-20}{8}=185$$ (0, 185, 370, 555, 740, etc.).

It is possible that a packet is fragmented at one router, and that the fragments are further fragmented at another router. For example, a packet of 4,520 bytes, including a 20 bytes IP header is fragmented to two packets on a link with an MTU of 2,500 bytes:

The total data size is preserved: 2,480 bytes + 2,020 bytes = 4,500 bytes. The offsets are $$0$$ and $$\frac{0+2{,}480}{8}=310$$.

When forwarded to a link with an MTU of 1,500 bytes, each fragment is fragmented into two fragments:

Again, the data size is preserved: 1,480 + 1,000 = 2,480, and 1,480 + 540 = 2,020.

Also in this case, the More Fragments bit remains 1 for all the fragments that came with 1 in them and for the last fragment that arrives, it works as usual, that is the MF bit is set to 0 only in the last one. And of course, the Identification field continues to have the same value in all re-fragmented fragments. This way, even if fragments are re-fragmented, the receiver knows they have initially all started from the same packet.

The last offset and last data size are used to calculate the total data size: $$495 \times 8+540=3{,}960+540=4{,}500$$.

Reassembly
A receiver knows that a packet is a fragment, if at least one of the following conditions is true:
 * The flag more fragments is set, which is true for all fragments except the last.
 * The field fragment offset is nonzero, which is true for all fragments except the first.

The receiver identifies matching fragments using the source and destination addresses, the protocol ID, and the identification field. The receiver reassembles the data from fragments with the same ID using both the fragment offset and the more fragments flag. When the receiver receives the last fragment, which has the more fragments flag set to 0, it can calculate the size of the original data payload, by multiplying the last fragment's offset by eight and adding the last fragment's data size. In the given example, this calculation was $$495 \times 8+540=4{,}500$$ bytes. When the receiver has all fragments, they can be reassembled in the correct sequence according to the offsets to form the original datagram.

Assistive protocols
IP addresses are not tied in any permanent manner to networking hardware and, indeed, in modern operating systems, a network interface can have multiple IP addresses. In order to properly deliver an IP packet to the destination host on a link, hosts and routers need additional mechanisms to make an association between the hardware address of network interfaces and IP addresses. The Address Resolution Protocol (ARP) performs this IP-address-to-hardware-address translation for IPv4. In addition, the reverse correlation is often necessary. For example, unless an address is preconfigured by an administrator, when an IP host is booted or connected to a network it needs to determine its IP address. Protocols for such reverse correlations include Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP), Bootstrap Protocol (BOOTP) and, infrequently, reverse ARP.

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: IPv4


text:
IPv6

Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) is the most recent version of the Internet Protocol (IP), the communications protocol that provides an identification and location system for computers on networks and routes traffic across the Internet. IPv6 was developed by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) to deal with the long-anticipated problem of IPv4 address exhaustion, and was intended to replace IPv4. In December 1998, IPv6 became a Draft Standard for the IETF, which subsequently ratified it as an Internet Standard on 14 July 2017.

Devices on the Internet are assigned a unique IP address for identification and location definition. With the rapid growth of the Internet after commercialization in the 1990s, it became evident that far more addresses would be needed to connect devices than the IPv4 address space had available. By 1998, the IETF had formalized the successor protocol. IPv6 uses 128-bit addresses, theoretically allowing 2128, or approximately $3.4$ total addresses. The actual number is slightly smaller, as multiple ranges are reserved for special usage or completely excluded from general use. The two protocols are not designed to be interoperable, and thus direct communication between them is impossible, complicating the move to IPv6. However, several transition mechanisms have been devised to rectify this.

IPv6 provides other technical benefits in addition to a larger addressing space. In particular, it permits hierarchical address allocation methods that facilitate route aggregation across the Internet, and thus limit the expansion of routing tables. The use of multicast addressing is expanded and simplified, and provides additional optimization for the delivery of services. Device mobility, security, and configuration aspects have been considered in the design of the protocol.

IPv6 addresses are represented as eight groups of four hexadecimal digits each, separated by colons. The full representation may be shortened; for example, 2001:0db8:0000:0000:0000:8a2e:0370:7334 becomes 2001:db8::8a2e:370:7334.

Main features

IPv6 is an Internet Layer protocol for packet-switched internetworking and provides end-to-end datagram transmission across multiple IP networks, closely adhering to the design principles developed in the previous version of the protocol, Internet Protocol Version 4 (IPv4).

In addition to offering more addresses, IPv6 also implements features not present in IPv4. It simplifies aspects of address configuration, network renumbering, and router announcements when changing network connectivity providers. It simplifies packet processing in routers by placing the responsibility for packet fragmentation in the end points. The IPv6 subnet size is standardized by fixing the size of the host identifier portion of an address to 64 bits.

The addressing architecture of IPv6 is defined in and allows three different types of transmission: unicast, anycast and multicast.

IPv4 address exhaustion

Internet Protocol Version 4 (IPv4) was the first publicly used version of the Internet Protocol. IPv4 was developed as a research project by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), a United States Department of Defense agency, before becoming the foundation for the Internet and the World Wide Web. IPv4 includes an addressing system that uses numerical identifiers consisting of 32 bits. These addresses are typically displayed in dot-decimal notation as decimal values of four octets, each in the range 0 to 255, or 8 bits per number. Thus, IPv4 provides an addressing capability of 232 or approximately 4.3 billion addresses. Address exhaustion was not initially a concern in IPv4 as this version was originally presumed to be a test of DARPA's networking concepts. During the first decade of operation of the Internet, it became apparent that methods had to be developed to conserve address space. In the early 1990s, even after the redesign of the addressing system using a classless network model, it became clear that this would not suffice to prevent IPv4 address exhaustion, and that further changes to the Internet infrastructure were needed.

The last unassigned top-level address blocks of 16 million IPv4 addresses were allocated in February 2011 by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) to the five regional Internet registries (RIRs). However, each RIR still has available address pools and is expected to continue with standard address allocation policies until one Classless Inter-Domain Routing (CIDR) block remains. After that, only blocks of 1,024 addresses (/22) will be provided from the RIRs to a local Internet registry (LIR). As of September 2015, all of Asia-Pacific Network Information Centre (APNIC), the Réseaux IP Européens Network Coordination Centre (RIPE NCC), Latin America and Caribbean Network Information Centre (LACNIC), and American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN) have reached this stage. This leaves African Network Information Center (AFRINIC) as the sole regional internet registry that is still using the normal protocol for distributing IPv4 addresses. As of November 2018, AFRINIC's minimum allocation is or 1024 IPv4 addresses. A LIR may receive additional allocation when about 80% of all the address space has been utilized.

RIPE NCC announced that it had fully run out of IPv4 addresses on 25 November 2019, and called for greater progress on the adoption of IPv6.

Comparison with IPv4
On the Internet, data is transmitted in the form of network packets. IPv6 specifies a new packet format, designed to minimize packet header processing by routers. Because the headers of IPv4 packets and IPv6 packets are significantly different, the two protocols are not interoperable. However, most transport and application-layer protocols need little or no change to operate over IPv6; exceptions are application protocols that embed Internet-layer addresses, such as File Transfer Protocol (FTP) and Network Time Protocol (NTP), where the new address format may cause conflicts with existing protocol syntax.

Larger address space
The main advantage of IPv6 over IPv4 is its larger address space. The size of an IPv6 address is 128 bits, compared to 32 bits in IPv4. The address space therefore has 2128=340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456 addresses (340 undecillion, approximately $3.4$). Some blocks of this space and some specific addresses are reserved for special uses.

While this address space is very large, it was not the intent of the designers of IPv6 to assure geographical saturation with usable addresses. Rather, the longer addresses simplify allocation of addresses, enable efficient route aggregation, and allow implementation of special addressing features. In IPv4, complex Classless Inter-Domain Routing (CIDR) methods were developed to make the best use of the small address space. The standard size of a subnet in IPv6 is 264 addresses, about four billion times the size of the entire IPv4 address space. Thus, actual address space utilization will be small in IPv6, but network management and routing efficiency are improved by the large subnet space and hierarchical route aggregation.

Multicasting
Multicasting, the transmission of a packet to multiple destinations in a single send operation, is part of the base specification in IPv6. In IPv4 this is an optional (although commonly implemented) feature. IPv6 multicast addressing has features and protocols in common with IPv4 multicast, but also provides changes and improvements by eliminating the need for certain protocols. IPv6 does not implement traditional IP broadcast, i.e. the transmission of a packet to all hosts on the attached link using a special broadcast address, and therefore does not define broadcast addresses. In IPv6, the same result is achieved by sending a packet to the link-local all nodes multicast group at address ff02::1, which is analogous to IPv4 multicasting to address 224.0.0.1. IPv6 also provides for new multicast implementations, including embedding rendezvous point addresses in an IPv6 multicast group address, which simplifies the deployment of inter-domain solutions.

In IPv4 it is very difficult for an organization to get even one globally routable multicast group assignment, and the implementation of inter-domain solutions is arcane. Unicast address assignments by a local Internet registry for IPv6 have at least a 64-bit routing prefix, yielding the smallest subnet size available in IPv6 (also 64 bits). With such an assignment it is possible to embed the unicast address prefix into the IPv6 multicast address format, while still providing a 32-bit block, the least significant bits of the address, or approximately 4.2 billion multicast group identifiers. Thus each user of an IPv6 subnet automatically has available a set of globally routable source-specific multicast groups for multicast applications.

Stateless address autoconfiguration (SLAAC)
IPv6 hosts configure themselves automatically. Every interface has a self-generated link-local address and, when connected to a network, conflict resolution is performed and routers provide network prefixes via router advertisements. Stateless configuration of routers can be achieved with a special router renumbering protocol. When necessary, hosts may configure additional stateful addresses via Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol version 6 (DHCPv6) or static addresses manually.

Like IPv4, IPv6 supports globally unique IP addresses. The design of IPv6 intended to re-emphasize the end-to-end principle of network design that was originally conceived during the establishment of the early Internet by rendering network address translation obsolete. Therefore, every device on the network is globally addressable directly from any other device.

A stable, unique, globally addressable IP address would facilitate tracking a device across networks. Therefore, such addresses are a particular privacy concern for mobile devices, such as laptops and cell phones. To address these privacy concerns, the SLAAC protocol includes what are typically called "privacy addresses" or, more correctly, "temporary addresses", codified in RFC 4941, "Privacy Extensions for Stateless Address Autoconfiguration in IPv6". Temporary addresses are random and unstable. A typical consumer device generates a new temporary address daily and will ignore traffic addressed to an old address after one week. Temporary addresses are used by default by Windows since XP SP1, macOS since (Mac OS X) 10.7, Android since 4.0, and iOS since version 4.3. Use of temporary addresses by Linux distributions varies.

Renumbering an existing network for a new connectivity provider with different routing prefixes is a major effort with IPv4. With IPv6, however, changing the prefix announced by a few routers can in principle renumber an entire network, since the host identifiers (the least-significant 64 bits of an address) can be independently self-configured by a host.

The SLAAC address generation method is implementation-dependent. IETF recommends that addresses be deterministic but semantically opaque.

IPsec
Internet Protocol Security (IPsec) was originally developed for IPv6, but found widespread deployment first in IPv4, for which it was re-engineered. IPsec was a mandatory part of all IPv6 protocol implementations, and Internet Key Exchange (IKE) was recommended, but with RFC 6434 the inclusion of IPsec in IPv6 implementations was downgraded to a recommendation because it was considered impractical to require full IPsec implementation for all types of devices that may use IPv6. However, as of RFC 4301 IPv6 protocol implementations that do implement IPsec need to implement IKEv2 and need to support a minimum set of cryptographic algorithms. This requirement will help to make IPsec implementations more interoperable between devices from different vendors. The IPsec Authentication Header (AH) and the Encapsulating Security Payload header (ESP) are implemented as IPv6 extension headers.

Simplified processing by routers
The packet header in IPv6 is simpler than the IPv4 header. Many rarely used fields have been moved to optional header extensions. The IPv6 packet header has simplified the process of packet forwarding by routers. Although IPv6 packet headers are at least twice the size of IPv4 packet headers, processing of packets that only contain the base IPv6 header by routers may, in some cases, be more efficient, because less processing is required in routers due to the headers being aligned to match common word sizes. However, many devices implement IPv6 support in software (as opposed to hardware), thus resulting in very bad packet processing performance. Additionally, for many implementations, the use of Extension Headers causes packets to be processed by a router's CPU, leading to poor performance or even security issues.

Moreover, an IPv6 header does not include a checksum. The IPv4 header checksum is calculated for the IPv4 header, and has to be recalculated by routers every time the time to live (called hop limit in the IPv6 protocol) is reduced by one. The absence of a checksum in the IPv6 header furthers the end-to-end principle of Internet design, which envisioned that most processing in the network occurs in the leaf nodes. Integrity protection for the data that is encapsulated in the IPv6 packet is assumed to be assured by both the link layer or error detection in higher-layer protocols, namely the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and the User Datagram Protocol (UDP) on the transport layer. Thus, while IPv4 allowed UDP datagram headers to have no checksum (indicated by 0 in the header field), IPv6 requires a checksum in UDP headers.

IPv6 routers do not perform IP fragmentation. IPv6 hosts are required to do one of the following: perform Path MTU Discovery, perform end-to-end fragmentation, or send packets no larger than the default maximum transmission unit (MTU), which is 1280 octets.

Mobility
Unlike mobile IPv4, mobile IPv6 avoids triangular routing and is therefore as efficient as native IPv6. IPv6 routers may also allow entire subnets to move to a new router connection point without renumbering.

Extension headers

The IPv6 packet header has a minimum size of 40 octets (320 bits). Options are implemented as extensions. This provides the opportunity to extend the protocol in the future without affecting the core packet structure. However, RFC 7872 notes that some network operators drop IPv6 packets with extension headers when they traverse transit autonomous systems.

Jumbograms
IPv4 limits packets to 65,535 (216−1) octets of payload. An IPv6 node can optionally handle packets over this limit, referred to as jumbograms, which can be as large as 4,294,967,295 (232−1) octets. The use of jumbograms may improve performance over high-MTU links. The use of jumbograms is indicated by the Jumbo Payload Option extension header.

IPv6 packets

An IPv6 packet has two parts: a header and payload.

The header consists of a fixed portion with minimal functionality required for all packets and may be followed by optional extensions to implement special features.

The fixed header occupies the first 40 octets (320 bits) of the IPv6 packet. It contains the source and destination addresses, traffic class, hop count, and the type of the optional extension or payload which follows the header. This Next Header field tells the receiver how to interpret the data which follows the header. If the packet contains options, this field contains the option type of the next option. The "Next Header" field of the last option points to the upper-layer protocol that is carried in the packet's payload.

The current use of the IPv6 Traffic Class field divides this between a 6 bit Differentiated Services Code Point and a 2-bit Explicit Congestion Notification field.

Extension headers carry options that are used for special treatment of a packet in the network, e.g., for routing, fragmentation, and for security using the IPsec framework.

Without special options, a payload must be less than 64 kB. With a Jumbo Payload option (in a Hop-By-Hop Options extension header), the payload must be less than 4 GB.

Unlike with IPv4, routers never fragment a packet. Hosts are expected to use Path MTU Discovery to make their packets small enough to reach the destination without needing to be fragmented. See IPv6 packet fragmentation.

Addressing
IPv6 addresses have 128 bits. The design of the IPv6 address space implements a different design philosophy than in IPv4, in which subnetting was used to improve the efficiency of utilization of the small address space. In IPv6, the address space is deemed large enough for the foreseeable future, and a local area subnet always uses 64 bits for the host portion of the address, designated as the interface identifier, while the most-significant 64 bits are used as the routing prefix. While the myth has existed regarding IPv6 subnets being impossible to scan, RFC 7707 notes that patterns resulting from some IPv6 address configuration techniques and algorithms allow address scanning in many real-world scenarios.

Address representation
The 128 bits of an IPv6 address are represented in 8 groups of 16 bits each. Each group is written as four hexadecimal digits (sometimes called hextets or more formally hexadectets and informally a quibble or quad-nibble ) and the groups are separated by colons. An example of this representation is.

For convenience and clarity, the representation of an IPv6 address may be shortened with the following rules:
 * One or more leading zeros from any group of hexadecimal digits are removed, which is usually done to all of the leading zeros. For example, the group is converted to . The group  is converted to.
 * Consecutive sections of zeros are replaced with two colons . This may only be used once in an address, as multiple use would render the address indeterminate. requires that a double colon not be used to denote an omitted single section of zeros.

An example of application of these rules:
 * Initial address:.
 * After removing all leading zeros in each group:.
 * After omitting consecutive sections of zeros:.

The loopback address is defined in  and is abbreviated to  by using both rules.

As an IPv6 address may have more than one representation, the IETF has issued a proposed standard for representing them in text.

Because IPv6 addresses contain colons, and URLs use colons to separate the host from the port number, RFC2732 specifies that an IPv6 address used as the host-part of a URL should be enclosed in square brackets, e.g. http://[2001:db8:4006:812::200e] or http://[2001:db8:4006:812::200e]:8080/path/page.html.

Link-local address

All interfaces of IPv6 hosts require a link-local address, which have the prefix. This prefix is followed by 54 bits that can be used for subnetting, although they are typically set to zeros, and a 64-bit interface identifier. The host can compute and assign the Interface identifier by itself without the presence or cooperation of an external network component like a DHCP server, in a process called link-local address autoconfiguration.

The lower 64 bits of the link-local address (the suffix) were originally derived from the MAC address of the underlying network interface card. As this method of assigning addresses would cause undesirable address changes when faulty network cards were replaced, and as it also suffered from a number of security and privacy issues, has replaced the original MAC-based method with the hash-based method specified in.

Address uniqueness and router solicitation
IPv6 uses a new mechanism for mapping IP addresses to link-layer addresses (e.g. MAC addresses), because it does not support the broadcast addressing method, on which the functionality of the Address Resolution Protocol (ARP) in IPv4 is based. IPv6 implements the Neighbor Discovery Protocol (NDP, ND) in the link layer, which relies on ICMPv6 and multicast transmission. IPv6 hosts verify the uniqueness of their IPv6 addresses in a local area network (LAN) by sending a neighbor solicitation message asking for the link-layer address of the IP address. If any other host in the LAN is using that address, it responds.

A host bringing up a new IPv6 interface first generates a unique link-local address using one of several mechanisms designed to generate a unique address. Should a non-unique address be detected, the host can try again with a newly generated address. Once a unique link-local address is established, the IPv6 host determines whether the LAN is connected on this link to any router interface that supports IPv6. It does so by sending out an ICMPv6 router solicitation message to the all-routers multicast group with its link-local address as source. If there is no answer after a predetermined number of attempts, the host concludes that no routers are connected. If it does get a response, known as a router advertisement, from a router, the response includes the network configuration information to allow establishment of a globally unique address with an appropriate unicast network prefix. There are also two flag bits that tell the host whether it should use DHCP to get further information and addresses:
 * The Manage bit, which indicates whether or not the host should use DHCP to obtain additional addresses rather than rely on an auto-configured address from the router advertisement.
 * The Other bit, which indicates whether or not the host should obtain other information through DHCP. The other information consists of one or more prefix information options for the subnets that the host is attached to, a lifetime for the prefix, and two flags:
 * On-link: If this flag is set, the host will treat all addresses on the specific subnet as being on-link and send packets directly to them instead of sending them to a router for the duration of the given lifetime.
 * Address: This flag tells the host to actually create a global address.

Global addressing
The assignment procedure for global addresses is similar to local-address construction. The prefix is supplied from router advertisements on the network. Multiple prefix announcements cause multiple addresses to be configured.

Stateless address autoconfiguration (SLAAC) requires a address block, as defined in. Local Internet registries are assigned at least blocks, which they divide among subordinate networks. The initial recommendation stated assignment of a subnet to end-consumer sites. This was replaced by, which "recommends giving home sites significantly more than a single , but does not recommend that every home site be given a either". s are specifically considered. It remains to be seen whether ISPs will honor this recommendation. For example, during initial trials, Comcast customers were given a single network.

IPv6 in the Domain Name System
In the Domain Name System (DNS), hostnames are mapped to IPv6 addresses by AAAA ("quad-A") resource records. For reverse resolution, the IETF reserved the domain ip6.arpa, where the name space is hierarchically divided by the 1-digit hexadecimal representation of nibble units (4 bits) of the IPv6 address. This scheme is defined in.

When a dual-stack host queries a DNS server to resolve a fully qualified domain name (FQDN), the DNS client of the host sends two DNS requests, one querying A records and the other querying AAAA records. The host operating system may be configured with a preference for address selection rules.

An alternate record type was used in early DNS implementations for IPv6, designed to facilitate network renumbering, the A6 records for the forward lookup and a number of other innovations such as bit-string labels and DNAME records. It is defined in and its references (with further discussion of the pros and cons of both schemes in ), but has been deprecated to experimental status.

Transition mechanisms
IPv6 is not foreseen to supplant IPv4 instantaneously. Both protocols will continue to operate simultaneously for some time. Therefore, IPv6 transition mechanisms are needed to enable IPv6 hosts to reach IPv4 services and to allow isolated IPv6 hosts and networks to reach each other over IPv4 infrastructure.

According to Silvia Hagen, a dual-stack implementation of the IPv4 and IPv6 on devices is the easiest way to migrate to IPv6. Many other transition mechanisms use tunneling to encapsulate IPv6 traffic within IPv4 networks and vice versa. This is an imperfect solution, which reduces the maximum transmission unit (MTU) of a link and therefore complicates Path MTU Discovery, and may increase latency.

Dual-stack IP implementation
Dual-stack IP implementations provide complete IPv4 and IPv6 protocol stacks in the operating system of a computer or network device on top of the common physical layer implementation, such as Ethernet. This permits dual-stack hosts to participate in IPv6 and IPv4 networks simultaneously. The method is defined in.

A device with dual-stack implementation in the operating system has an IPv4 and IPv6 address, and can communicate with other nodes in the LAN or the Internet using either IPv4 or IPv6. The DNS protocol is used by both IP protocols to resolve fully qualified domain names and IP addresses, but dual stack requires that the resolving DNS server can resolve both types of addresses. Such a dual-stack DNS server holds IPv4 addresses in the A records and IPv6 addresses in the AAAA records. Depending on the destination that is to be resolved, a DNS name server may return an IPv4 or IPv6 IP address, or both. A default address selection mechanism, or preferred protocol, needs to be configured either on hosts or the DNS server. The IETF has published Happy Eyeballs to assist dual-stack applications, so that they can connect using both IPv4 and IPv6, but prefer an IPv6 connection if it is available. However, dual-stack also needs to be implemented on all routers between the host and the service for which the DNS server has returned an IPv6 address. Dual-stack clients should be configured to prefer IPv6 only if the network is able to forward IPv6 packets using the IPv6 versions of routing protocols. When dual-stack network protocols are in place the application layer can be migrated to IPv6.

While dual-stack is supported by major operating system and network device vendors, legacy networking hardware and servers do not support IPv6.

ISP customers with public-facing IPv6

Internet service providers (ISPs) are increasingly providing their business and private customers with public-facing IPv6 global unicast addresses. If IPv4 is still used in the local area network (LAN), however, and the ISP can only provide one public-facing IPv6 address, the IPv4 LAN addresses are translated into the public facing IPv6 address using NAT64, a network address translation (NAT) mechanism. Some ISPs cannot provide their customers with public-facing IPv4 and IPv6 addresses, thus supporting dual-stack networking, because some ISPs have exhausted their globally routable IPv4 address pool. Meanwhile, ISP customers are still trying to reach IPv4 web servers and other destinations.

A significant percentage of ISPs in all regional Internet registry (RIR) zones have obtained IPv6 address space. This includes many of the world's major ISPs and mobile network operators, such as Verizon Wireless, StarHub Cable, Chubu Telecommunications, Kabel Deutschland, Swisscom, T-Mobile, Internode and Telefónica.

While some ISPs still allocate customers only IPv4 addresses, many ISPs allocate their customers only an IPv6 or dual-stack IPv4 and IPv6. ISPs report the share of IPv6 traffic from customers over their network to be anything between 20% and 40%, but by mid-2017 IPv6 traffic still only accounted for a fraction of total traffic at several large Internet exchange points (IXPs). AMS-IX reported it to be 2% and SeattleIX reported 7%. A 2017 survey found that many DSL customers that were served by a dual stack ISP did not request DNS servers to resolve fully qualified domain names into IPv6 addresses. The survey also found that the majority of traffic from IPv6-ready web-server resources were still requested and served over IPv4, mostly due to ISP customers that did not use the dual stack facility provided by their ISP and to a lesser extent due to customers of IPv4-only ISPs.

Tunneling
The technical basis for tunneling, or encapsulating IPv6 packets in IPv4 packets, is outlined in RFC 4213. When the Internet backbone was IPv4-only, one of the frequently used tunneling protocols was 6to4. Teredo tunneling was also frequently used for integrating IPv6 LANs with the IPv4 Internet backbone. Teredo is outlined in RFC 4380 and allows IPv6 local area networks to tunnel over IPv4 networks, by encapsulating IPv6 packets within UDP. The Teredo relay is an IPv6 router that mediates between a Teredo server and the native IPv6 network. It was expected that 6to4 and Teredo would be widely deployed until ISP networks would switch to native IPv6, but by 2014 Google Statistics showed that the use of both mechanisms had dropped to almost 0.

IPv4-mapped IPv6 addresses

Hybrid dual-stack IPv6/IPv4 implementations recognize a special class of addresses, the IPv4-mapped IPv6 addresses. These addresses are typically written with a 96-bit prefix in the standard IPv6 format, and the remaining 32 bits are written in the customary dot-decimal notation of IPv4.

Addresses in this group consist of an 80-bit prefix of zeros, the next 16 bits are ones, and the remaining, least-significant 32 bits contain the IPv4 address. For example, represents the IPv4 address. A previous format, called "IPv4-compatible IPv6 address", was ; however, this method is deprecated.

Because of the significant internal differences between IPv4 and IPv6 protocol stacks, some of the lower-level functionality available to programmers in the IPv6 stack does not work the same when used with IPv4-mapped addresses. Some common IPv6 stacks do not implement the IPv4-mapped address feature, either because the IPv6 and IPv4 stacks are separate implementations (e.g., Microsoft Windows 2000, XP, and Server 2003), or because of security concerns (OpenBSD). On these operating systems, a program must open a separate socket for each IP protocol it uses. On some systems, e.g., the Linux kernel, NetBSD, and FreeBSD, this feature is controlled by the socket option IPV6_V6ONLY.

The address prefix is a class of IPv4-embedded IPv6 addresses for use in NAT64 transition methods. For example, represents the IPv4 address.

Security
A number of security implications may arise from the use of IPv6. Some of them may be related with the IPv6 protocols themselves, while others may be related with implementation flaws.

Shadow networks
The addition of nodes having IPv6 enabled by default by the software manufacturer may result in the inadvertent creation of shadow networks, causing IPv6 traffic flowing into networks having only IPv4 security management in place. This may also occur with operating system upgrades, when the newer operating system enables IPv6 by default, while the older one did not. Failing to update the security infrastructure to accommodate IPv6 can lead to IPv6 traffic bypassing it. Shadow networks have occurred on business networks in which enterprises are replacing Windows XP systems that do not have an IPv6 stack enabled by default, with Windows 7 systems, that do. Some IPv6 stack implementors have therefore recommended disabling IPv4 mapped addresses and instead using a dual-stack network where supporting both IPv4 and IPv6 is necessary.

IPv6 packet fragmentation
Research has shown that the use of fragmentation can be leveraged to evade network security controls, similar to IPv4. As a result, requires that the first fragment of an IPv6 packet contains the entire IPv6 header chain, such that some very pathological fragmentation cases are forbidden. Additionally, as a result of research on the evasion of RA-Guard in, has deprecated the use of fragmentation with Neighbor Discovery, and discouraged the use of fragmentation with Secure Neighbor Discovery (SEND).

Working-group proposals
Due to the anticipated global growth of the Internet, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) in the early 1990s started an effort to develop a next generation IP protocol. By the beginning of 1992, several proposals appeared for an expanded Internet addressing system and by the end of 1992 the IETF announced a call for white papers. In September 1993, the IETF created a temporary, ad hoc IP Next Generation (IPng) area to deal specifically with such issues. The new area was led by Allison Mankin and Scott Bradner, and had a directorate with 15 engineers from diverse backgrounds for direction-setting and preliminary document review: The working-group members were J. Allard (Microsoft), Steve Bellovin (AT&T), Jim Bound (Digital Equipment Corporation), Ross Callon (Wellfleet), Brian Carpenter (CERN), Dave Clark (MIT), John Curran (NEARNET), Steve Deering (Xerox), Dino Farinacci (Cisco), Paul Francis (NTT), Eric Fleischmann (Boeing), Mark Knopper (Ameritech), Greg Minshall (Novell), Rob Ullmann (Lotus), and Lixia Zhang (Xerox).

The Internet Engineering Task Force adopted the IPng model on 25 July 1994, with the formation of several IPng working groups. By 1996, a series of RFCs was released defining Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6), starting with. (Version 5 was used by the experimental Internet Stream Protocol.)

RFC standardization
The first RFC to standardize IPv6 was the in 1995, which became obsoleted by  in 1998. In July 2017 this RFC was superseded by, which elevated IPv6 to "Internet Standard" (the highest maturity level for IETF protocols).

Deployment

The 1993 introduction of Classless Inter-Domain Routing (CIDR) in the routing and IP address allocation for the Internet, and the extensive use of network address translation (NAT), delayed IPv4 address exhaustion to allow for IPv6 deployment, which began in the mid-2000s.

Universities were among the early adopters of IPv6. Virginia Tech deployed IPv6 at a trial location in 2004 and later expanded IPv6 deployment across the campus network. By 2016, 82% of the traffic on their network used IPv6. Imperial College London began experimental IPv6 deployment in 2003 and by 2016 the IPv6 traffic on their networks averaged between 20% and 40%. A significant portion of this IPv6 traffic was generated through their high energy physics collaboration with CERN, which relies entirely on IPv6.

The Domain Name System (DNS) has supported IPv6 since 2008. In the same year, IPv6 was first used in a major world event during the Beijing 2008 Summer Olympics.

By 2011, all major operating systems in use on personal computers and server systems had production-quality IPv6 implementations. Cellular telephone systems presented a large deployment field for Internet Protocol devices as mobile telephone service made the transition from 3G to 4G technologies, in which voice is provisioned as a voice over IP (VoIP) service that would leverage IPv6 enhancements. In 2009, the US cellular operator Verizon released technical specifications for devices to operate on its "next-generation" networks. The specification mandated IPv6 operation according to the 3GPP Release 8 Specifications (March 2009), and deprecated IPv4 as an optional capability.

The deployment of IPv6 in the Internet backbone continued. In 2018 only 25.3% of the about 54,000 autonomous systems advertised both IPv4 and IPv6 prefixes in the global Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) routing database. A further 243 networks advertised only an IPv6 prefix. Internet backbone transit networks offering IPv6 support existed in every country globally, except in parts of Africa, the Middle East and China. By mid-2018 some major European broadband ISPs had deployed IPv6 for the majority of their customers. Sky UK provided over 86% of its customers with IPv6, Deutsche Telekom had 56% deployment of IPv6, XS4ALL in the Netherlands had 73% deployment and in Belgium the broadband ISPs VOO and Telenet had 73% and 63% IPv6 deployment respectively. In the United States the broadband ISP Xfinity had an IPv6 deployment of about 66%. In 2018 Xfinity reported an estimated 36.1 million IPv6 users, while AT&T reported 22.3 million IPv6 users.

title: IPv6