1-1
1 IPv6 Configuration
z 3Com Switch 4210 Family support IPv6 management features, but do not support IPv6 forwarding
and related features.
z The term “router” in this document refers to a router in a generic sense or an Ethernet switch
running a routing protocol.
IPv6 Overview
Internet protocol version 6 (IPv6), also called IP next generation (IPng), was designed by the Internet
Engineering Task Force (IETF) as the successor to Internet protocol version 4 (IPv4). The significant
difference between IPv6 and IPv4 is that IPv6 increases the IP address size from 32 bits to 128 bits.
IPv6 Features
Header format simplification
IPv6 cuts down some IPv4 header fields or move them to extension headers to reduce the load of basic
IPv6 headers. IPv6 uses a fixed-length header, thus making IPv6 packet handling simple and improving
the forwarding efficiency. Although the IPv6 address size is four times that of IPv4 addresses, the size of
basic IPv6 headers is only twice that of IPv4 headers (excluding the Options field). For the specific IPv6
header format, see
Figure 1-1.
Figure 1-1 Comparison between IPv4 header format and IPv6 header format
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