Quality of Service and performance characterization of IPv6 relative to IPv4

II.4 IP ADDRESS

An Internet Protocol address (IP address) is a unique number that devices use in order to identify and communicate with each other on a computer network utilizing the Internet Protocol standard (IP). IP address is used in different ways to identify a particular network and a host on that network.^13(*)

II.4.1 IPv6 address

The most obvious distinguishing feature of IPv6 is its use of much larger addresses. The size of an address in IPv6 is 128 bits, which is four times larger than an address in IPv4. A 32-bit address space allows for 2³² or 4,294,967,296 possible addresses. A 128-bit address space allows for 2¹²⁸ or (3.4 × 10³⁸) possible addresses.^14(*)

II.4.1.1 IPv6 node has multiple addresses

Any IPv6 node should recognize the following addresses as identifying itself:

· Link-local address for each interface.

· Site-local address for each interface.

· Assigned (manually or automatically) unicast/anycast addresses

· Loop back address

· All-nodes multicast address

· Solicited-node multicast address for each of its assigned unicast and anycast address

· Multicast address of all other groups to which the host belongs

* ¹³ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IP_address (May 30, 2006)

* ¹⁴ http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/winxppro/maintain/xpmanaged/15_xpip6.mspx (May 12, 2006)