6 Advantages and Disadvantages of IPv6 | Limitations & Benefits of IPv6

What is IPv6 ?

IPv6 is a type of internet protocol that routes traffic across the internet. It was mainly developed to resolve the address exhaustion issue faced by the IPv4. The role of IPv6 is to deliver data packets from the source to its host. For this it uses address space which is of 128 bits. Therefore, it can allow over 340 trillion trillion trillion... addresses in the figure. Which means that more devices can be connected with more address space. 

 

Where is IPv6 used ?

Due to this large amount of address space support, it is used more frequently in IoT industry. Al though IPv6 is considered as a powerful industry standard, there are still some limitations in them. It is important to know the advantages as well as disadvantages of IPv6 before deciding to switch to it. 

 

In this article, I will be concentrating on 6 Advantages and Disadvantages of IPv6 | Limitations & Benefits of IPv6. Through this post, you will know the pros and cons of using IPv6.

 

Let's get started,

 

Advantages of IPv6

 

1. Efficient Routing

 

In IPv6 the size of the routing table is reduced to an extent that hierarchical address allocation is created for providing efficient routing. And also fragmentation is done using a source device instead of a router. Therefore, a protocol known as Maximum Transmission Unit (MTU) is used for path allocation. 

 

 

2. Increased Capacity

 

Since IPv6 is based on 128 bit addressing scheme, it provides more address space compared to a standard IPv4 addressing. The length of the network and host components are doubled. Even if there are more web addresses, it can be easily accommodated because the resources are allocated efficiently.

 

 

3. Directed Addressing

 

IPv6 uses multicast addressing instead of broadcast. In here large data packets are sent across various directions simultaneously. Hence, network bandwidths are conserved significantly. 

 

 

4. No Subnetting

 

IPv6 completely avoids subnetting problems by using automatic configuration. Automatic configuration came as a replacement for static IP addresses. 

 

 

5. Security

 

IPv6 is designed to carry out IPSec security. IPSec contains Authentication Headers (AH) which has authentication methods inbuilt into network firewall.

 

 

6. Mobility

 

IPv6 provides seamless connections when devices are moved from one location to another. This is achieved by avoiding triangular routing where connections to the proxies are sent even before transferring to the host. Hence, without any renumbering, all the subnets are moved to a new router.

 

Disadvantages of IPv6

 

1. System Issues

 

Depending on the type of system, you have to enable IPv6 routing. If it is enabled manually, the IP needs to be typed. Besides that the IP address needs to be remembered too. This task isn't easy since the IP address involves large letters and numbers. 

 

 

2. Topology Support

 

When the IPv6 protocol is used, it is difficult to fix prefixes on most of the topology drawings. This is because of the extra space that IPv6 module is equipped with. 

 

 

3. Device Upgrade

 

Many of the networking devices on default are not designed for IPv6 adoption. Even if the devices are updated regularly. This is not easy since it requires expert opinion to make the transformation seamless.

 

 

4. IP Address Assigning

 

For assigning IP address to devices, Local Network Management should be involved. Since this process is done manually it is quite complicated.

 

 

5. IP Scheme Conversion

 

Since there is no backward compatibility the process of transition from IPv4 to IPv6 is slow and complicated. Moreover a sum of amount is needed to be paid by the Internet Service Provider (ISP) to switch between different protocols.

 

 

6. Communication

 

Communication between IPv4 and IPv6 is complex such that in very rare instances they will be able to. The communication cannot be made directly.