IPv4
IPv4 was created when the internet was born in 1981 and is still used today. It is the network communication protocol that computers use to talk to each other over the internet. An IPv4 address is a unique identifier that is used to identify an individual computer that is connected to the internet. It is 32-bits long and is commonly represented in dotted-decimal notation. This notation divides the bits into four, 8-bit chunks and displays each chunk as a number ranging from 0 to 255. Each number is separated with a dot. For example: 192.168.2.1.
At its inception, the set of all possible IPv4 addresses, called the address space, was divided into “classes”. Each class contained a finite number of “chunks” of addresses. The number of addresses in each chunk varied depending on the class. The idea was that institutions, such as companies and schools, could purchase one of these chunks, and then dole out the addresses in the chunk to all the computers on their network. Larger institutions with lots of computers could purchase a more expensive, higher class chunk that had lots of addresses, while smaller institutions that had fewer computers could purchase a cheaper, lower class chunk that had fewer sub addresses.
The classes are summarized below. If you want to learn more about the logic behind how they were organized, I suggest you read this Wikipedia page.
|
Class |
Number of chunks |
Number of addresses in each chunk |
|
Class A |
128 |
16,777,216 |
|
Class B |
16,384 |
65,536 |
|
Class C |
2,097,152 |
256 |
|
Class D |
reserved |
|
|
Class E |
reserved |
|
Do you see a problem here?
The problem with this scheme was that companies were unlikely to use every address that was available to them. The choices for the number of addresses you could have varied wildly—you could have 16,777,216, 65,536, or 256! You couldn't have anything in between! If a company needed, say, 1,000 addresses, they had no choice but to purchase a Class B address and put all the rest to waste. To top it off, some of the organizations that were involved in the early development of the internet possessed Class A chunks, which they were hardly making any use of.
This started to become a pressing issue as the internet grew. The risk that all IP addresses would be used up, called IP address exhaustion, became a real possibility.
CIDR
As shown, the way the class system divided up its chunks of addresses was very coarse-grained, which resulted in lots of wasted addresses. To combat this, the class system was done away with in 1993 and replaced with a system called CIDR (Classless Inter-Domain Routing). This system gives organizations many more choices regarding how many addresses they are assigned, which results in less wasted addresses.
CIDR uses something called variable-length subnet masking (VLSM), which allows the address's subnet mask (the part that identifies which organization an address belongs to) to be of any size. The class system, on the other hand, only permitted the subnet mask to be 8 bits (Class A), 16 bits (Class B), or 24 bits (Class C) long. With CIDR, if your company only needed 1,000 addresses, you could purchase a 1,024 chunk (22-bit subnet mask, leaving 10-bits for the address, 2^10=1,024).
CIDR notation consists of an IP address, followed by the number of bits the address uses for its subnet mask. For example, 192.168.100.14/22 represents the IP address 192.168.100.14 with the first 22 bits of that address being the subnet mask.
But CIDR is only a stop-gap measure. The IPv4 address space consists of about 4.3 billion addresses, which seems like a lot. But on a global scale, it is not. If the internet continues to grow, the IPv4 address space will soon run out. A more permanent solution would be to increase the length of the IP address. Enter IPv6.
IPv6
Created in 1998, IPv6 addresses are a whopping 128 bits long, resulting in an incredibly large address space of 3.4 x 10^38 (the number of grains of sand on Earth...or something?).
IPv6 addresses are represented as eight, four character, hexadecimal strings separated by colons.
FEDC:0000:0000:0000:00CF:0000:BA98:1234
Because they are so long, there are tricks you can employ to make them shorter. If a segment contains all zeroes, you can replace the segment with a single zero:
FEDC:0:0:0:00CF:0:BA98:1234
If an address contains consecutive segments which consist of all zeroes, you can replace them with a double colon (but you can only use this trick once):
FEDC::00CF:0:BA98:1234
And if a segment begins with zeroes, you can leave the zeroes out (unless the segment contains all zeroes, in which case you must leave one zero in):
FEDC::CF:0:BA98:1234
IPv6 and IPv4 are not compatible with each other, which complicates the migration process. While it is likely that the network card in your computer supports both IPv4 and IPv6, the infrastructure around the globe that makes the internet work cannot switch over so easily. It will be a long and piecemeal process. But if all goes well, you won't even know it happened.
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