A Comparative Study between IPv4 and IPv6

Abstract

The transition between the Internet Protocol Version 4 (IPv4) and Internet Protocol Version 6 (IPv6) will be a long process during both protocol coexists and it unreasonable to expect that many millions of IPv4 nodes will be converted overnight. Mobility is becoming ubiquitous nowadays. This paper has described about a background study of IPv4 and IPv6, the needs of IPv6, transition mechanisms in the various architectures, and comparison of the IPv4 and IPv6 in two major areas; header format and transition mechanism. Then, the transformation of IPv4 to IPv6 addressing by using tunnel and dual stack protocol will be discussed.