Let’s take a closer look at how the compression rules work below.įollowing the Three Rules of IPv6 Compression

However, there are rules that must be followed to perform the compression correctly and still point to the correct address. To make this new protocol easier to use, it’s helpful to compress the address into something a little more manageable.

In its natural state, an IPv6 address uses eight fields that are separated by colons, and within each of those eight fields is 16 bits. Of course, it follows that IPv6 addresses will be much longer than their predecessors, due to all of those extra bits. This vast expansion in capacity is due to the use of 128-bit addresses in IPv6 as opposed to just 32-bit addresses in IPv4. As the world was quickly running out of IP address options due to the proliferation of digital devices, it became important to upgrade to IPv6 to open up trillions of more potential IP addresses. You can use the both zero and leading zero compression together by following the rules of these compression techniques.For years, the internet and the devices that connect to it have steadily been working toward IPv6 from the previous version of the internet protocol, IPv4. IPv6 address with Leading zero compression:Ģ001:1265:0:0:AE4:0:5B:6B0 Both Zero and Leading zero compression If you have all zero in a hextex you can represent this hextex with one zero. In leading zero compression you can eliminate the starting zero(s) from any hextex. Review the example for better understanding.Ģ001:1265::0AE4:0000:005B:06B0 IPv6 Leading Zero Compression In zero compression you can represent group of zeros by one double-colon (::) but you can perform this only once in your IPv6 address, means if you have two group of zeros in your IPv6 address you can use the double-colon only once. These compression rules and methods are as follow: IPv6 address consist of 8 hextets or parts which is normally difficult to remember, therefore there are some compression method, using compression techniques you can represent IPv6 in more understandable and simple way. This is a simple example of IPv6 address, you can see in below figure IPv6 address have eight hextets/parts and each hextet/part consist of 4 digits and of 16bits, while every digits is of 4bits that you can find from above table. Representation of all hexadecimal number/digits in binary form is as follows: Hexadecimal # IPv6 addresses are in hexadecimal form, so each digit is of four bits, IPv6 address’s consist of possible digits are 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 A B C D E F. IPv6 address is of 128 bits and represented in eight octets of 16 bits.

Rules of ipv6 compression