IP Address Standards: IPv4 and IPv6

• Standard


  Provides rules for different areas of computing, published by a group of people specifying how some aspect of computing should work
• Standards


  • Allow different hardware and software to interact and work together, enabling interoperability
• Examples of standards


  • Unicode
  • File formats
  • USB
  • CD
  • HTML
  • CSS
• Protocol


  A set of rules which enable communication to be followed
• IP address


  Allocated to each device running the internet protocol, specifies the location of a device on a network
• IPv4 address


  Uses 32 binary digits, represented in dotted decimal notation
• IPv6 address


  Uses 128 binary digits, represented in colon hex notation
• IPv4 addresses


  Not enough unique addresses, leading to the creation of IPv6
• IPv6 can represent around 440 trillion trillion trillion unique addresses
• It takes a long time for new standards to be accepted and used by major companies