Internet Protocol Version 6

With the explosion of the World Wide Web and email the 32-bit addresses Internet Protocol version 4 used would run out in the not-so-distant future. In 1994, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) established a working group to define the successor to IPv4, IPv6. In March 2008 the US government issued a memorandum requiring that by June 2008 "all agencies" infrastructure must be using IPv6. This article provides the rationale for the US government\´s edict, along with the technical features that distinguish IPv6 from its predecessor, IPv4.