IPv6
version 6 of the Internet Protocol
Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) is the most recent version of the Internet Protocol (IP), the communications protocol that provides an identification and location system for computers on networks and routes traffic across the Internet. IPv6 was developed by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) to deal with the long-anticipated problem of IPv4 address exhaustion, and was intended to replace IPv4. In December 1998, IPv6 became a Draft Standard for the IETF, which subsequently ratified it as an Internet Standard on 14 July 2017.
Devices on the Internet are assigned a unique IP address for identification and location definition. With the rapid growth of the Internet after commercialization in the 1990s, it became evident that far more addresses would be needed to connect devices than the approximately 4 billion (232) addresses IPv4 made available. By 1998, the IETF had formalized the successor protocol, IPv6. It uses 128-bit addresses, yielding an address space of 2128 addresses (approximately 3.4×1038, 340 undecillion). Several transition mechanisms have been devised to allow IPv4 and IPv6 to interoperate, but IPv6 is not backwards-compatible with IPv4 and the two do not interoperate directly.
IPv6 provides other technical benefits in addition to a larger addressing space. In particular, it permits hierarchical address allocation methods that facilitate route aggregation across the Internet, and thus limit the expansion of routing tables.
The public source identifies “IPv6” as version 6 of the Internet Protocol. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around IPv6, version and Internet.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 22, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q2551624. The first chronological checks are 1998, 2017 and 1038.
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This entry incorporates text from “IPv6” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.