Friday, November 14, 2008

IPv4 address Exhaustion

Internet Protocol fourth revision ( IPv4 ) exhaustion referring to the decreasing of the available of the allocations for IPv4. This concern was started since 1980s when the Internet started to grow dramatically. There are many actions being taken to resolve and secure the situation, methods like classful network, C.I.D.R. , D.H.C.P. , network address translations (NAT) and these actions have significantly delayed the exhaustion.

The green grass in the picture below shows the available IPv4 ( but I not sure on the updated, the map was actually created some time ago ) :

map_of_the_internet

Let's see the dramatic growth of the IPv4 usage :

ipmap3

In order to resolve this problem, the experts have introduced the Internet Protocol revision 6 and IPv6 has a much larger address space than IPv4. The IPv6 is built up with 128-bits long and segmented into 8 groups of 4 HEX characters. 50% of it represent the Network ID while the other 50% represent the Network Host.

empireTower The experts believe IPv6 will have need a very long time until it is exhausted again! A rough calculation, there are about 350 Trillions Trillions Trillions IP Addresses are available!!! There is someone making the assumption if ONE IPv6 equal to an Atom, then it would takes up more than 1 millions of Empire Tower to represent the entire IPv6 block!! Impressive right?!

 

A Quote from wikipedia :

IPv6 is intended to be the long-term solution to the IPv4 address shortage. Instead of a 32 bit address, with 4.3 billion possible hosts, IPv6 uses 128 bit addresses, providing 3.4×1038 or 50 octillion for each of the roughly 6.5 billion people on Earth.

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