Addressing and transition - from IPv4 to IPv6 in government networks

Addresses are one of the most useful inventions of the past. They are used to locate somebody or something spatially or geographically, to identify a fixed or mobile device or to send messages to electronic mailboxes. Most of these addresses have a textual representation being easy to remember or they may consist of numbers easy to forget -therefore the phonebook was invented. In case of electronic communication, no user needs to care much about the decimal or hexadecimal representation of addresses being used by technical systems to connect to each other or to send messages around. We are used to writing names such as www.ec.europa.eu to address a server instead. Yet, basically all communication between all stakeholders takes place based on IP addresses. This booklet will give a short introduction to IP addressing and the structure of IPv6 addresses, on how you can get IPv6 address space and the options you have to structure and tailor the address space to your needs. The German address plan will be used as an example.