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By Fredrik Nilsson
Security Technology and Design

As of January 2008, the world population was estimated to be 6.6 billion and is projected to reach 9 billion by 2050. As our population expands and becomes more technologically advanced, more people will use and be connected through the Internet, cell phones and other devices. Why does this matter? The growth of our population and use of networked devices means better and more scalable networks are needed to handle the increased bandwidth of users.
Version 4 of the Internet Protocol, more commonly called IPv4, is the most widely used version of Internet Protocol and is a set of techniques used to connect and transmit data over the Internet. IPv4 was designed in the 1970s by a U.S. government organization that wanted new, lower-layer protocols because the existing layers had become functionally inadequate. Since IPv4 was published in 1981, IP has enabled significant development and greater communication worldwide; however, the growth of Internet use has slowly taken its toll on IPv4.
Computers and devices that need to connect through the Internet require IP addresses. As more people connect, the number of IP addresses left dwindle. Reports estimate that the pool of unallocated IP addresses will run out by 2010, which is why experts started developing a new version of the Internet, called “version 6,” or IPv6, back in the 1990s. During this time, two problems became apparent; IP addresses were being exhausted and IP routing tables were growing very large. In theory, IPv4 is supposed to handle four billion devices, however, the practical limit based on current usage is more like 250 million devices. From 1991 to 1995, routing tables doubled in size every 10 months, which put additional stress on router processing power and memory allocation. The short-term solution was small changes to the current IP, including a new allocation policy and private IP addresses set aside for intranets. The long-term solution was a new IP version with much bigger address space.
Over the last two decades, the world has experienced an explosion of new Internet appliances — from IP phones and laptops to devices like network cameras. All of these devices need IP addresses. Reports estimate 1.5 billion Internet appliances by 2010 compared with 44 million in 2003. That is a significant increase in seven years. Internet usage has also seen strong growth. In 2007, an estimated 1.2 billion were using the Internet with the world total penetration rate at just under 17 percent. American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN), the regional registry of IP and ASN numbers for North America, South America, the Caribbean and sub-Saharan Africa, has made it clear that the limited number of addresses currently available means the migration to IPv6 is necessary.

Why IPv6?
IPv6 helps solve the IP address shortage because it supports 340 trillion trillion trillion unique addresses whereas IPv4 only supports four billion. In addition to more IP addresses, IPv6 brings superior reliability, flexibility and security to the Internet that IPv4 cannot provide. IPv4 has many issues that make it unviable for the future. For example, IPv4 was never designed to be secure. It was originally designed for an isolated military network and was later adopted as a public education and research network. IPv4 security is retrofitted, and many security features are optional — you cannot count on their availability. As technology advances, new applications are much more demanding on the network. They demand guaranteed on-time delivery, availability of bandwidth and increased security. The possibility of adding on to the base of IPv4 technology is costly, labor intensive and error-prone, which is why IPv6 is the way of the future.
IPv6 will not change the functionality of network video products, but it will make systems run more efficiently. Consider how people used to get mail. Decades ago, people were sent mail based on their name and street address. When the population grew, a zipcode system was designed so that the delivery of mail could scale to the increased number of people getting mail. Similarly, IPv6 is simply a more efficient way of delivering information.
In addition to the availability of IP addresses, the advantages of IPv6 include better IP address architecture, IP auto-configuration, renumbering to simplify switching entire corporate networks between providers, faster routing, point-to-point encryption and connectivity using the same address in changing networks.

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