WHAT IS IPv6?
IPv6 is an ever-emerging star of the Internet. Several years ago, when the protocol started to be drafted, it immediately entered under every spotlight available in IT. Back then, the perspective of not having any more IPv4 addresses to assign seemed horrifying: nobody was ready for it, and there were quite a few people who expected the Internet to be dead and buried in a few months. The fears seemed to be premature back then. Indeed, five years after news of IPv6 started grabbing the headlines, the perspective of IPv4 depletion is still at least five years away. This does serve IANA's purposes: the migration is slow and gradual. But most important, the migration is not determined only by the depletion problem. IPv6 offers several advantages of its own, besides the much larger address space, which ensures that IPv6 addresses will certainly not be depleted anywhere in the following decades. What are these advantages? The IPv6 protocol includes many innovations, along with some featu...