I’ll start this discussion by taking us through the experience of a certain man I’ll call “Dunta” (not his real name) in one African village. Mr. Dunta ran out of names for his children. I’m sure many of us know that many African countries allow polygamy. In that case many men marry more than one wife at a time, although most men marry only one.

South African President Jacob Zuma, who is married to four wives, is a prominent example of an African marrying more than one wife. He vigorously defends polygamy, saying it’s part of his culture and charging that those who think their culture is superior have a problem. But then, some people in Africa take polygamy to extraordinary levels. Even in a society where polygamy is nothing unusual, Mr. Dunta, a wealthy farmer, was an aberration. He married 53 wives and had over 180 children.

Usually, it was a man’s duty to give names to each child born to him. And, names in Nigeria are not selected arbitrarily. Each name must have a specific meaning that usually reflects the parents’ beliefs, hopes, circumstances, or a plea or praise to God, or wishes for the child. For example, my name is an assertion that “children are more important than wealth or fame.” At a time, Dunta would name a new child and he will be told that he already had child with the same name. He’d try another name, and he’ll be told it had been taken. He’d try yet another name and he’d be told it wasn’t available. So, in frustration, he named one particular child “Ojulam” meaning "I’m tired of all these." He then reportedly asked his wives and grown children to find new meanings in the lives of the family for which names can be extracted and assigned. They tried, but could only come up with the idea of extending already existing names by adding some emphasis or extension tags. For example, for the name “Ngozi” which means "God’s blessings", he would call another child “Ngoziozo” meaning “God’s blessings again.” Thus, the names of his children started getting longer, weirder and more difficult for people to fathom. Suffice it to say that Dunta continued having difficulties issuing names, and the villagers then started making jokes out of Dunta’s experience, calling him Mr. “Ahagwugo”, meaning Mr. “I’m out of Names.” He died some years back though.

The experience of Mr. Dunta, a.k.a. Mr. Ahagwugo [Out of Names] was like that which the Internet community has had in assigning IP addresses. The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) has done well in managing the IP address space allocations globally. Even more so, as it came up with delegating 5 Regional Internet Registries (RIRs) to apportion IP address blocks to ISPs and other entities.

The Regional Internet Registry system evolved over time, eventually dividing the world into five RIRs, as follows:

African Network Information Centre (AfriNIC) for Africa
American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN) for the USA, Canada, several parts of the Caribbean region, and Antarctica.
Asia-Pacific Network Information Centre (APNIC) for Asia, Australia, New Zealand, and neighboring countries
Latin America and Caribbean Network Information Centre (LACNIC) for Latin America and parts of the Caribbean region
Réseaux IP Européens Network Coordination Centre (RIPE NCC) for Europe, Russia, the Middle East, and Central Asia

Map of the five RIRs is shown below:

Regional Internet Registries world map

In the address allocating system, the Internet Protocol Version 4 (IPv4) was the 4th version in the development IP and the 1st version of the protocol to be extensively deployed. With IPv4 system, an IP address is a 32-bit number such as 99.34.467.122. Thus, IPv4 can support a total of 2^32 IP addresses; it can support about 4.3 billion addresses. While this number is quite a lot, the fact is that all 4.3 billion addresses have at this time been assigned to different companies and institutions, such as IBM, Ford, MIT. Today, there is a crisis. In spite of this IPv4 ingenuity, being that it’s an amazing mainstay for moving Internet traffic, available (unassigned) Internet IP addresses are running out as a result of the immense growth of the Internet. Yet, it is pertinent to pinpoint that we haven't actually run out of IP addresses at the moment. The problem is that many of the addresses are unused and in the hands of few companies and institutions to whom they’ve been assigned. As a result, it is anticipated that the IPv4 IP address will become scarcer and more costly to obtain for use over the next 1 or 2 years and that this will ultimately create problems for the Internet.

Due to the impending depletion of available IP addresses, a new version of IP addressing was developed in 1995. It is IPv6. It uses 128 bits for the IP address (Comer, 2009). It was standardized as RFC 2460 in 1998 has seen ongoing deployment since the mid-2000s. The IPv6 system will offer a lot more numerical IP addresses than IPv4. Since it utilizes 128-bit number system, it can support 2^128 IP addresses; it can support 340,282,366,920,938,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 addresses – a lot more that IPv4’s approximately 4,390,000,000 possible addresses. IPv6 will also simplify address allocations and provide extra network security features.

But, transitioning from IPv4 to IPv6 is not going to be an easy ride. Not only is it going to be challenging for the engineers, but somehow for everyday user as well.

The limitations of the IPv4 addressing was recognized about two decades ago. And, the implementation of IPv6 has been going on since the last decade. But, progress has been very slow: just a small part of the web has changed over to IPv6. Again, IPv4 and IPv6 fundamentally run as parallel networks. Thus, exchange of data between these protocols entails special gateways. To make the transition, existing networking software and routers need to be changed to support IPv6. And, this will require a lot of time and financial resources.
On January 12, 2011, five companies: Google, Yahoo, Facebook, Akamai Technologies, and Limelight Networks orchestrated World IPv6 Day. It was a technical testing and publicity event for IPv6. Following its success, the Internet Society carried out a World IPv6 Launch day on June 6, 2012. But, instead of testing, it sought to bring about permanent deployment of IPv6 in the products and services of the participants. Actually, the participants achieved some successes and promises. According to Fiocco (2012), “content that currently receives roughly 30% of global World Wide Web IPv4 page-views should now have become available via IPv6.” On the day of lunch, IPv6 traffic on AMS-IX rose by 50%; it rose from 2 Gbit/s to 3 Gbit/s.

For the regular Internet user, there should be no major impact on his or life. Most commonly used OSs actually support IPv6. Windows XP SP1, Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows and Mac OS X 10.2 all support IPv6. On the other hand, many routers and servers do not support it. Thus, a connection between a device with an IPv6 address to an IPv4-only router or server is not ordinarily possible. However, there are ongoing efforts to make IPv4 and IPv6 systems interoperable. For example, Hamarsheh, Goossens and Al-Qerem (2012) introduced a new mechanism called AIN-PT. It stands for “Assuring Interoperability between heterogeneous (IPv4/IPv6) Networks without ("minus") using Protocol Translation.” The mechanisms proposed by the researchers seeks to make “communication between two heterogeneous networks (operating on two different IP protocols) possible by tunneling IPv4 packets in IPv6 packets, instead of translating complete headers between IPv4 and IPv6.” Before then on January 6, 2011, Kim Yong Ho and Ryu Gi Seon of LG Electronics Inc. based in South Korea had filed a patent application for IP addressing that will support support IPv4 and IPv6. LG Electronics described their system as “a broadcast dedicated connection identifier … used for broadcasting certain types of Internet Protocol control messages to allow proper IP address establishment for IPv4 and IPv6."

NTT Communications' native, tunneling, and dual stack gateway services

As the NTT Communications' native, tunneling, and dual stack gateway services, illustrated above, demonstrate, there is a lot of transitions going on from IPv4 to IPv6. During the transition, IPv6 and IPv4 will co-exist, with traffic steadily moving to IPv6.

By and large, IPv6 technology is still emerging. Although, it promises ultimate improvements on network security, many bugs are still being experienced.

References

Comer, D. (2009). Computer networks and internets. Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Pearson/Prentice Hall.

Fiocco, A. (2012). World IPv6 launch: Impact on the Web. Cisco Systems.

Hamarsheh, A., Goossens, M., & Al-Qerem, A. (2012). Assuring interoperability between heterogeneous (IPv4/IPv6) networks without using protocol translation. IETE Technical Review, 29(2), 114-132. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.4103/0256-4602.95384

LG electronics inc files patent application for IP addressing to support IPv4 and IPv6. (2011, Jan 12). Indian Patents News. Retrieved from http://search.proquest.com/docview/835109441?accountid=8289

NTT Communications (2013). IPv6. Retrieved from http://www.us.ntt.net/products/internet-access/ipv6.cfm