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In December 1995, the network working group of IETF proposed a longer-term solution for specifying and allocating IP addresses. RFC 2373 describes the address space associated with the IPv6. The biggest concern with Internet developers will be the migration process from IPv4 to IPv6. IPv4 addressing has the following shortcoming: IPv4 was defined when the Internet was small and consisted of networks of limited size and complexity. It offered two layers of address hierarchy (netid and hostid) with three address formats (class A, B and C) to accommodate varying network sizes. Both the limited address space and the 32-bit address size in IPv4 proved to be inadequate for handling the increase in the size of the routing table caused by the immense numbers of active hosts and servers. IPv6 is designed to improve upon IPv4 in each of these areas. IPv6 allocates 128 bits for addresses. Analysis shows that this address space will suffice to incorporate flexible hierarchies and to distribute the responsibility for allocation and management of the IP address space. Like IPv4, IPv6 addresses are represented as string of digits (128 bits or 32 hex digits) which are further broken down into eight 16-bit integers separated by colons (:). The basic representation takes the form of eight sections, each two bytes in length. xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx
where each xx represents the hexadecimal form of 16 bits of address. IPv6 uses hexadecimal colon notation with abbreviation methods.


This is all about the IPv 6 Addressing. Enjoy......