Techno-News Blog Ray Schroeder, editor, OTEL - University of Illinois at Springfield |
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Thursday, April 25, 2002
http://techupdate.zdnet.com/techupdate/stories/main/0,14179,2862374,00.html IPv6--what's in it, and what's in it for you Lee Schlesinger While you probably know that the IETF drafted an IPv6 specification for the next generation of the Internet Protocol, you may not be familiar with its specifics--or why it's important to enterprises. IPv6 increases IP address space to 128 bits, thus increasing the pool of addresses from IPv4's 2^32 to 2^128, or 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456--a high number commonly referred to as "plenty." IPv6 also simplifies IP headers to improve packet handling. Even though IPv6 addresses are four times longer than IPv4's 32-bit addresses, IPv6 packet headers are only twice the size of IPv4's. Throughput is always an issue where network traffic is concerned. Network pipes are more likely to become clogged as traffic from more devices traverses them. IPv6 adds quality-of-service (QoS) capabilities, so senders can request, and devices can apply, special handling to different kinds of traffic. That's something bandwidth management devices like Packeteer's PacketShaper can do today by deducing traffic characteristics from packet headers. Making QoS information explicit will help routers process packets more quickly, making it easier, for example, to give real-time multimedia higher than default QoS, while simple file transfers might get lower....
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