On designing address lookup methods for IPv6

Adoption of IP version 6 will solve the threat of running out of the IP address space. IPv6 increases the length of IP address from 32 bits, provided by IPv4, to 128 bits. Such address space should be more than adequate for all needs that can be imagined. Nevertheless, there are also worries concerning the impact of handling very long addresses to the performance of the IP routers. These worries have lead to efforts to prove the scalability of existing IPv4 address lookup algorithms and, if the scalability is lacking, efforts to modify them to better suit for 128 bit addresses. However, those efforts seems to be missing the whole point - the address structure in IPv6 differs completely from that of IPv4. Thus new ways to do the address lookup are needed. These new methods can utilise simple table lookup operations and thus they can easily exceed the speed of existing IPv4 address lookup algorithms.