Discuss two drawbacks of IPv4 and how IPv6 addresses those drawbacks.

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

IPv4 has serious drawbacks. IP addresses are now in short supply, so Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6), which has a larger address space of 128 bits, is being deployed to allow an  almost endless supply of IP addresses. Because an IPv4 address is 32 bits long, IPv4 permits a total of 232 addresses, which is more than 4 billion. With 128 bits, IPv6 offers 2128 addresses, which is 340 undecillion. An undecillion is a 1 followed by 39 zeros.

IPv4 also presents problems with the routing system. Routers on the Internet backbone have
routing tables with about 90,000 entries. Routers get the job done, but because most computers are not connected directly to the Internet backbone, a packet must traverse several extra hops along the route to its destination. In IPv6, backbone routing tables need only the entries of other routers that are connected directly to them. The information in an IPv6 header
contains the rest of the information needed to get a packet to its destination, so the process is
streamlined.

Security is another concern with IPv4. Although it does support IPsec (an industry standard
set of encryption and authentication protocols), IPv4 has no native encryption methods. Plenty
of encryption methods are available, but the lack of standardization can create compatibility
problems, and encryption can increase overhead on the network. IPv6, on the other hand,
has integrated support for IPsec.

Another advantage of IPv6 is that Network Address Translation (NAT) is not needed because of the vast number of IP addresses provided. While NAT has worked well enough to deal with the decreasing number of IP addresses in IPv4, NAT has security problems. In short, because NAT devices need to read encapsulated IP headers, it is difficult to maintain data confidentiality for end-to-end transmissions; typically, the packets are unencrypted by the NAT firewall and sent through the internal network unencrypted. IPv6 obviates this problem.

Another major advantage of IPv6 is its autoconfiguration capabilities. Instead of relying
solely on Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) or manual configuration, IPv6
can determine its own settings based on two different models