IPv6

Why in news?

• Ministry of Electronics & Information Technology (MeitY) has unveiled three path breaking initiatives of National Internet Exchange of India (NIXI) which will play a supporting role for the IPv6 awareness and adoption in the country.

About IPv6:

• Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) is the most recent version of the Internet Protocol (IP), the communications protocol that provides an identification and location system for computers on networks and routes traffic across the Internet.
• IPv6 was developed by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) to deal with the long-anticipated problem of IPv4 address exhaustion and is intended to replace IPv4.
• Internet Protocol Version 4 (IPv4) was the first publicly used version of the Internet Protocol, developed as a research project by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), a United States Department of Defense agency, before becoming the foundation for the Internet and the World Wide Web.
• IPv4 includes an addressing system that uses numerical identifiers consisting of 32 bits which provides an addressing capability of 232 or approximately 4.3 billion addresses, which has become inadequate with growing internet infrastructure.
• IPv6 uses a 128-bit address, theoretically allowing creation of 3.4×10^38 addresses. The actual number is slightly smaller, as multiple ranges are reserved for special use or completely excluded from use.
• The two protocols are not designed to be interoperable, and thus direct communication between them is impossible, complicating the move to IPv6. However, several transition mechanisms have been devised to rectify this.

The three initiatives:

• IPv6 Expert Panel (IP Guru) (https://nixi.in): IP Guru is a group to extend support to all the Indian entities who are finding it technically challenging to migrate and adopt IPv6.
• NIXI Academy (https://training.nixi.in): NIXI Academy is created to educate technical/non-technical people in  India to learn and relearn technologies like IPv6 which are normally not taught in Educational Institutes..
• NIXI-IP-INDEX (https://ipv6.nixi.in): NIXI has developed an IPv6 index portal for the Internet community. NIXI-IP-INDEX portal will showcase the IPv6 adoption rate in India and across the world. It can be used to compare IPv6 Indian adoption rate with other economies in the world.

Prelims Question

Consider the following statements regarding IPv6:
1.It uses a 128-bit address for creation of Internet addresses.
2.It is intended to replace IPv4 which is currently used for creation of addresses.
Choose the correct statements from the codes given below:
(a)1 only
(b)2 only
(c)Both 1 and 2
(d)Neither 1 nor 2

Answer to Prelims question