1.2 Comparing IPv4 and IPv6

The following features differentiate IPv6 from IPv4:

Two additional features are improvements over IPv4:

1.2.1 Addressing Differences

IPv6 supports private and public addresses as part of the architecture and associates them with a lifetime. IPv4 added the concept of scope or private addresses at a later time. Mechanisms like Dynamic Host Control Protocol try to associate lifetime to addresses in IPv4.

IPv6 addresses uses unicast, multicast, and anycast addresses. IPv4 does not have the anycast addressing as part of the base specification.

1.2.2 Configuration

IPv6 brings in plug‑and‑play support for hosts as part of the base specification. Routers can be configured to advertise subnet prefixes and MTU parameters. Most of the facilities provided by IGMP router discovery and ARP in IPv4 are provided as part of the Neighbor Discovery protocol in IPv6.