Short for
Internet Protocol next generation, a version of the
Internet Protocol (IP) reviewed in
IETF standards committees to replace IP version 4. The official name of IPng is
IPv6, where the
v6 stands for
version 6. The current version of IP is version 4, so it is sometimes referred to as
IPv4. IPv6 is designed as an evolutionary upgrade to the Internet Protocol and will, in fact, coexist with the older IPv4 for some time. IPv6 is designed to allow the Internet to grow steadily, both in terms of the number of hosts connected and the total amount of data traffic transmitted.