These days, 5G appears in every message you can see, with all the hype reminding everyone of the arrival of a new generation of the Internet. In fact, 5G was mentioned a few years ago, but why did it start to jump on the hot now? That’s where IPv6 comes in.

Perhaps there are many friends to IPv6 is not detailed cognition, here is a brief introduction to IPv6.

Talk about IPv4 and IPv6

First of all, we need to know that the current network Protocol is mainly IPv4, which is called Internet Protocol Version 4. It is used to assign an IP address to each network and each host. IP address is a 32-bit binary number, which has 2^32 addresses. That seems like a lot. But smart devices abound, and IANA’s IPv4 address pool has been exhausted since February 3, 2011. In the upcoming 5G era, every mobile phone, smart bracelet, smart watch, router and other devices will occupy an IP address, and even TV sets, smart refrigerators, smart washing machines, air conditioners, door locks and other smart furniture that can access the Internet will also need their own IP addresses.

IPv6, more, faster and more secure

To solve this problem, THE IETF designed IPv6 to replace the current version of the IP protocol, IPv4. The length of IPv6 addresses is 128 bits, four times that of IPv4 addresses. 128 bits of IPv6 addresses can provide 3.402823669 × 10³⁸ addresses. It can almost assign an IP address to every grain of sand in the world, and effectively supports the development of 5G era.

In addition, IPv6 has much faster transmission speeds.

Compared with IPv4, which requires a lot of data to be carried, IPv6’s fixed header is very short, which can greatly improve network data forwarding efficiency. In addition, the IPv6 routing table is smaller and has stronger aggregation capability, which ensures shorter data forwarding paths and greatly improves forwarding efficiency.

At the same time, information security is more and more important today. IPv4 does not require IPSec to encrypt data, which leads to leakage data transmission in plaintext. IPv6 integrates IPSec to authenticate and encrypt data at the network layer, providing end-to-end data security for users and preventing data hijacking.

Transitioning from IPv4 to IPv6

Given all the benefits of IPv6, you may wonder why IPv4 is still the most popular version of IPv6.

Because IPv6 and IPv4 are completely incompatible protocols (compatible in a few specific scenarios), if you want to upgrade from IPv4 to IPv6, you need to support IPv6 for both application clients, server applications, routers, and so on. The cost of upgrading this is huge. In order to make the transition from IPv4 to IPv6 successfully, IETF put forward a variety of schemes, among which double stack technology and tunnel technology are the better methods.

The dual stack mechanism enables aN IPv6 network node to have one IPv4 stack and one IPv6 stack, supporting both IPv4 and IPv6 protocols. However, this will lead to more resource occupation and complex operation and maintenance.

Tunneling is a mechanism that encapsulates IPv6 packets into IPv4 packets when necessary so that IPv6 packets can be transmitted over the existing IPv4 infrastructure. However, considering that the tunnel technology uses the public network, the network is not controllable, and the support protocol and other problems, although you can rent the private line of the operator, the cost of the private line is too high.

Of course, no matter what kind of technology, cost, time and difficulty are a big problem, let people can not help but wonder if there is a way to do not need to maintain their own, do not need to build their own line, just need to CDN speed up a little finger to configure the domain name can be happy to use IPv6.

The whole network supports IPv6

Let me tell you a piece of good news: the whole network now supports IPv6. As a leading data cloud service provider in China, Youpaiyun began to invest in the construction of IPv6 in 2016 to provide customers with intelligent IPv6 services. By 2019, Youpaiyun has completed the deployment of IPv6 resources in the whole network, and has become the leading cloud service provider supporting IPv6 in the whole network in China. And Youpaiyun IPv6 is open by default, you only need to use CDN accelerated one-click configuration, there is no need to configure IPv6 source site, and there is no need to provide a special IPv6 domain name, just need to add the enterprise domain name CNAME to Youpaiyun.

Youpaiyun provides the statistics and analysis function of IPv6 data. You can view the statistics of IPv6 traffic and bandwidth on the console. You can also view the IPv6 traffic distribution of your own services by region and carrier. At the same time, we provide log download and 7*24 hours real-time network performance monitoring, so that you can always control the overall business situation.

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