The Birth Of Tcp Ip Version 6

Published Date: 02 Nov 2017

Abstract

This reportcontains why TCP/IP was created and the evolution of TCP/IP. Mainly described how and why TCP/IPv4 was developed from the inception of the internet and explained how we arrived at the current situation and why change is so slow amongst those most able to influence change.Finally described how this protocol was developed and is it likely we'll ever see a new protocol on the Internet after this.

Introduction to TCP/IP

Why was TCP/IP created?

TCP/IP protocol suite is the most popular network protocol in the world.It is the set of communications protocols used for the Internet and other similar networks. It is named from two of the most important protocols in it: the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and the Internet Protocol (IP), which were the first two networking protocols defined in this standard. It was designed in 1970s by two DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) scientists- Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn. TCP/IP was the result for ARPANET project which has sponsored by DARPA.

In the beginning they started by conducting research on reliable data communications across packet radio networks, factored in lessons learned from the Networking Control Protocol, and then created the next generation Transmission Control Protocol (TCP), the standard protocol used on the Internet today. The main reason for TCP/IP created was in 1969, the DARPA commissioned development of a network over which its research centers might communicate. Its chief concern was this network’s capability to withstand a nuclear attack. In short, if the Soviet Union launched a nuclear attack, it was imperative that the network remain intact to facilitate communication. The design of this network had several other requisites, the most important of which was this: It had to operate independently of any centralized control. Thus, if 1 machine was destroyed (or 10, or 100), the network would remain impervious. The prototype for this system emerged quickly, based in part on research done in 1962 and 1963. That prototype was called ARPANET. ARPANET reportedly worked well, but was subject to periodic system crashes. Furthermore, long-term expansion of that network proved costly. A search was initiated for a more reliable set of protocols; that search ended in the mid-1970s with the development of TCP/IP. With the implementations, by January 1983, all the computers connected to the ARPANET were running the new TCP/IP protocols. In addition, many sites that were not connected to the ARPANET also were using the TCP/IP protocols because the ARPANET generally was limited to a select group of government departments and agencies.

Why did TCP/IP become the dominant network protocol?When it happened?

DARPA then contracted with BBN Technologies, Stanford University and the University College London to develop operational versions of the protocol on different hardware platforms. Four versions were developed: TCP v1, TCP v2, a split into TCP v3 and IP v3 in the spring of 1978, and then stability with TCP/IP v4-the standard protocol still in use on the Internet today.

In 1975, a two-network TCP/IP communications test was performed between Stanford and University College London (UCL). In November, 1977, a three-network TCP/IP test was conducted between sites in the US, UK, and Norway. Several other TCP/IP prototypes were developed at multiple research centers between 1978 and 1983. The migration of the ARPANET to TCP/IP was officially completed on January 1, 1983, when the new protocols were permanently activated.

In March 1982, the US Department of Defense declared TCP/IP as the standard for all military computer networking. In 1985, the Internet Architecture Board held a three day workshop on TCP/IP for the computer industry, attended by 250 vendor representatives, promoting the protocol and leading to its increasing commercial use. That is how TCP/IP became the dominant network protocol.

Evolution of TCP/IP

How has TCP/IP changed? What has been added to it? Why?

TCP/IP was lightweight (it required meager network resources). Moreover, TCP/IP could be implemented at much lower cost than the other choices then available. Based on these amenities, TCP/IP became exceedingly popular.TCP/IP is being reexamined and more users translate to greater network load. To ease that network load and offer greater speeds of data transport, some researchers have suggested implementing TCP/IP via satellite transmission. Unfortunately, such research has thus far produced dismal results. TCP/IP is apparently unsuitable for this implementation.TCP/IP is used for many purposes, not just the Internet. For example, intranets are often built using TCP/IP. In such environments, TCP/IP can offer significant advantages over other networking protocols. One such advantage is that TCP/IP works on a wide variety of hardware and operating systems. Thus, one can quickly and easily create a heterogeneous network using TCP/IP. Such a network might have Macs, IBM compatibles, Sun Sparcstations, MIPS machines, and so on. Each of these can communicate with its peers using a common protocol suite. A minimally acceptable implementation includes the following protocols in the internet protocol suite, listed from most essential to least essential: IP, ARP, ICMP, UDP, TCP and sometimes IGMP. In principle, it is possible to support only one transport protocol, such as UDP but this is rarely done because it limits usage of the whole implementation. . In 1978 and 1983 - Several TCP/IP prototypes were developed at multiple research centers and in 1983 - ARPANET switched from NCP to TCP/IP. There are some other protocols which are possibly being implemented entirely in userspace such as DNS for resolving domain names to IP addresses or DHCP for automatically configuring network interfaces.

Most IP implementations are accessible to programmers through sockets and APIs.Unique implementations like Lightweight TCP/IP, an open source stack designed for embedded systems and KA9Q NOS, a stack and associated protocols for amateur packet radio systems and personal computers connected via serial lines. In 1995 - Internet service providers (ISPs) started offering Internet access to businesses and individuals. These implementations have been added to this TCP/IP because it is a standard, complete and widely accepted routable enterprise networking protocol available. It provides interoperable communications between all types of hardware and all kinds of operating systems.It is highly reliable, robust cross platform client/server framework.It provides a way to gain access to internet. It is expandable and is responsible for the phenomenal growth of Internet.

What was/is the crisis of TCP/IP?

The Internet Protocol (IP) has its roots in early research networks of the 1970s, but within the past decade has become the leading network-layer protocol. This means that IP is a primary vehicle for a vast number of client/server and peer-to-peer communications, and the current scale of deployment is straining many aspects of its twenty-year old design.

IPv4 uses 32-bit addresses that mean 4-byte addresses, which limits the address space to 4294967296 (232) addresses. These addresses were assigned to users and the number of unassigned addresses decreased therefore IPv4 address exhaustion occurred on February 3, 2011. It had been significantly delayed by address changes such as classful network design, Classless Inter-Domain Routing and network address translation (NAT). An IP address was divided into two parts. They are, the network identifier was the most significant (highest order) octet of the address and the host identifier was the rest of the address. The latter was therefore also called the rest field. This enabled the creation of a maximum of 256 networks. This was quickly found to be inadequate. Privet networks of the approximately four billion addresses allowed in IPv4, three ranges of address are reserved for use in private networks. These ranges are not routable outside of private networks and private machines cannot directly communicate with public networks.

Birth of TCP/IP version 6

Why was TCP/IPv6 created? When? What things were considered when TCP/IPv6 was created?

After examining a number of proposals, the IETF settled on IPv6, recommended in January 1995 in RFC 1752, sometimes also referred to as the Next Generation Internet Protocol, or IPng. Since then, a number of organizations, such as the IPv6 Forum, have been working towards its widespread implementation. By 2004, IPv6 was widely available from industry and supported by most new network equipment. Practical feedback began to be being received from experience with integration with existing networks.TCP/IPv6 was created because IPv6 is of considerable importance to businesses, consumers and network access providers of all sizes. IPv6 is designed to improve upon IPv4's scalability, security, ease-of-configuration and network management; these issues are central to the competitiveness and performance of all types of network-dependent businesses. IPv6 aims to preserve existing investment as much as possible. End users, industry executives, network administrators, protocol engineers, and many others will benefit from understanding the ways that IPv6 will affect future internetworking and distributed computing application like cloud computing ,Grid computing etc. Every individual is to be identified as the requirement of today’s Science and Technology.World IPv6 Launch was organized by major Internet service providers and users on 6 June 2012, for which they deployed IPv6 addresses to some of their users, especially in countries that had been lagging in IPv6 adoption.

IPv4 has not been substantially changed since the publication of its specifications in 1981. IPv4 has proved to be robust, easily implemented, interoperable and scalable enough to enable a global utility of the size of Today’s Internet. However, the initial design did not anticipate IP’s huge deployment, and several problems now lead to the deployment of IPv6. They are the explosive growth of the Internet and the emerging exhaustion of IPv4 addresses, the growth of the Internet and the ability of Internet backbone routers to maintain large routing tables, the need for simpler configuration, the need for better support for real-time delivery of data, called as well quality of service (QoS), the requirement for security at the IP level, efficient mobility mechanisms in IP have become critical with the apparition of new mobile devices such as PDAs or mobile phones and the arrival of multimedia applications which would be far more efficient with an effective multicast support in IP. Those are the things that they were considered when TCP/IPv6 was created.

The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) has produced specifications that define the next-generation IP protocol known as "IPng," or "IPv6." IPv6 is both a near-term and long-range concern for network owners and service providers. IPv6 products have already come to market; on the other hand, IPv6 development work will likely continue well into the next decade. Though it is based on much-needed enhancements to IPv4 standards, IPv6 should be viewed as a new protocol that will provide a firmer base for the continued growth of today's internetworks.Because it is intended to replace IPv4, IPv6 is of considerable importance to businesses, consumers, and network access providers of all sizes. IPv6 is designed to improve upon IPv4's scalability, security, ease-of-configuration, and network management; these issues are central to the competitiveness and performance of all types of network-dependent businesses. IPv6 aims to preserve existing investment as much as possible. End users, industry executives, network administrators, protocol engineers, and many others will benefit from understanding the ways that IPv6 will affect future internetworking and distributed computing applications.

Every device on the Internet, such as a computer or mobile telephone, must be assigned an IP address for identification and location addressing in order to communicate with other devices. With the ever-increasing number of new devices being connected to the Internet, the need arose for more addresses than IPv4 is able to accommodate. IPv6 uses a 128-bit address, allowing for 2128, or approximately 3.4×1038 addresses, or more than 7.9×1028 times as many as IPv4, which uses 32-bit addresses. IPv4 allows for only approximately 4.3 billion addresses. The two protocols are not designed to be interoperable, complicating the transition to IPv6. IPv6 addresses consist of eight groups of four hexadecimal digits separated by colons.

Resulting Impact

How long ago was this crisis foreseen? Why hasn't TCP/IPv6 been adopted? What has happened to date to actually implement TCP/IPv6?

For as long as there has been an Internet, IPv4 has been synonymous with IP and few people ever stopped to think about which version of the protocol it was. But IPv4 has outlived its usefulness. Its successor, IPv6, after nearly two decades of development is finally ready to replace IPv4 as the backbone of the Internet. IPv6 is necessary because IPv4 is out of IP addresses. IPv4 supports only 4.3 billion addresses; and with PCs, smartphones, tablets, and gaming systems connecting to the Internet, the system is running dry. In contrast, IPv6 uses 128-bit addresses and can maintain 340 undecillion (340 X 10^6) addresses.IPv6 is different and also better than IPv4 as vastly expanding the pool of IP addresses will yield other benefits, as well. Owing to the dearth of IPv4 addresses, much of the Internet currently relies on Network Address Translation. But with IPv6, every device can have its own unique public IP address.

Most home and small-business users have one IP address on the Internet— the one for the router that links their hardware to their ISP. The router issues IP addresses internally to the devices that attach to it, but it must constantly keep track of which traffic belongs to which device, and translate the IP address from the internal one to the public one to facilitate online communications.Though IPv4 and IPv6 are not directly compatible, researchers realized that they couldn't simply flip a switch and turn off IPv4 while most of the world still depended on it. IPv6 devices are built using a process called dual stack that permits IPv6 and IPv4 to run simultaneously alongside each other.The great majority of devices connected to the Internet today are not compatible with IPv6, and dual-stack technology ensures that legacy IPv4 devices will still work for the foreseeable future.

SMBs need to be aware that IPv8 is here, and they need to make sure that any future PC, mobile device, network infrastructure, or other IT purchases support the next-generation protocol. IPv4 should remain alive and kicking longs enough for most organizations to switch to IPv6 by attrition over time.The most important reasons an SMB should plan on making the switch to IPv6 are inevitability, efficiency, and security. Since IPv6 will soon be the only option for adding new devices or hosts on the Internet, SMBs should transition to IPv6 sooner rather than later so that the inevitable extinction of IPv4, when it occurs, won't negatively affect their businesses.

And finally, whereas IPv4 was never meant to be secure, IPv6 has been built from the ground up with security in mind. Many security features duct-taped after the fact onto IPv4 as optional features are integrated into IPv6 as default requirements. IPv6 encrypts traffic and checks packet integrity to provide VPN-like protection for standard Internet traffic.

Conclusion

From this report we can have a vast knowledge of internet protocol suite, the history of it and also the current situation of it. Mainly I have described lot more about TCP/IPv4 and TCP/IPv6 with the implementations of them from the beginning. I have explained about the crisis of TCP/IP and the resulting impacts under sub topics in this report.