There are several reasons why a new version of IP has been developed. One of these reasons is to provide a greater address range. This new version, IPv6, is starting to emerge from the research laboratories and move into products and networks.
The IPv6 address is 128 bits in length and is defined in RFC4291. This address space is equivalent to 5.67 x 1028 addresses for each person on the planet.With such a large address space, a different notation scheme is needed to represent each
address.
Each address is represented by eight groups of four hexadecimal digitsFEDC:2A5F:709C:0216:AEBC:0097:3154:3D12
Each group of four hexadecimal digits therefore represents 16 bits.
If any of the groups are all zeros then the format can be further simplified as shown below: