Rather than the single colon that typically breaks up the eight fields of the address, this double colon is an indication that a segment of continuous zeroes has been removed.

In the place of those zeroes, you simply use a double colon or “::” symbol. To start with, a run of continuous zeroes can be eliminated when compressing an IPv6 address. Properly adhering to these three rules means the address you are left with will correspond properly to the full-length version that you started with. To properly compress an IPv6 address down into something more manageable and easier to use, there are three rules that you must follow. 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. In summary, compressing and expanding IPv6 addresses can be useful for simplifying the representation of addresses and making them easier to work with, but it is important to understand the context in which compression is used and to be able to expand compressed addresses when necessary.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.

This is often required for compatibility with systems that do not support compressed IPv6 addresses, or for troubleshooting purposes when working with IPv6 networks. On the other hand, in some situations, it may be necessary to expand a compressed IPv6 address to its full representation. The most common form of IPv6 address compression involves the elimination of leading zeros in each 16-bit block of the address and the substitution of consecutive blocks of zeros with a double colon ('::'). In some cases, it may be desirable to compress the representation of an IPv6 address to make it more concise and easier to work with. In IPv6, addresses are represented using hexadecimal notation, which can result in long and complex strings of characters.

2 rules of ipv6 compression