What is IPv4, IPv6 Addresses and where IPv5 Internet Protocol Address is?

IPv4 Address:

IPv4 (Internet Protocol version 4) was the first publicly used version of the internet protocol. An internet protocol is the set of rules that govern how packets are transmitted over a network. IPv4 was developed as a research project by the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), a United States Department of Defence agency, before becoming the foundation for the Internet and the World Wide Web. IPv4 includes an addressing system that uses numerical identifiers consisting of 32 bits. The format of IPv4 addresses is the ###.###.###.### format, which is made up of four numerical octets (a unit of digital information in computing consisting of eight bits), with each set ranging from 0 to 255 and separated by periods. Thus, IPv4 provides an addressing capability of 232 or approximately 4.3 billion addresses.

IPv6 address:

IPv6 (Internet Protocol version 6) is the most recent version of the Internet Protocol (IP), the communications protocol that provides an identification and location system for computers on networks and routes traffic across the Internet. IPv6 was developed by IETF i.e. Internet Engineering Task force to deal with the biggest problem of IPv4 address exhaustion. 

IPv6 was developed in the 1990s to solve the addressing limitation, and commercial deployment of this new internet protocol began in 2006. IPv6 is a 128-bit protocol, and it provides vastly more IP Addresses. The format of IPv6 is a series of eight 4-character hexadecimal numbers; each of these represents 16 bits, for a total of 128 bits. The characters in an IPv6 address is numbers from 0 to 9 and letters from A to F.

An example of an IPv6 address is 2001:0db8:0000:0000:1234:0ace:6006:001e. IPv6 has the capacity to offer trillions upon trillions of IP addresses (as many as 3.4x1038 addresses) with little chance of running out.

IPv6 is developed to overcome the problem of IPv4. In December 1998, IPv6 became a Draft Standard for the IETF, who subsequently ratified it as an Internet Standard on 14 July 2017.

We know IPv4 and IPv6 but ever wondered where IPv5 Internet Protocol Address is?

As I said above, an internet protocol is the set of rules that govern how packets are transmitted over a network. IPv5 is also a version of internet protocol (IP) IPv4 and IPv6 that was never formally adopted as a standard. 

The v5 stands for version 5 of the Internet Protocol. Usually, Computer networks use version 4, typically called Ipv4, or a newer version of IP called Ipv6. IPv5 that was also known as Internet Stream Protocol, abbreviated simply as ST. It was designed for connection-oriented communications across IP networks with the intent of supporting voice and video.

One shortcoming that undermined its popular use was its 32-bit address scheme – the same scheme used by IPv4. As a result, it had the same problem that IPv4 had – a limited number of possible IP addresses.

ST was effective at transferring data packets on specific frequencies while maintaining communication. It would eventually serve as a foundation for the development of technologies such as voice-over-IP, or VoIP, which is used for voice communications over the internet.

IPv5 used the same IPv4's 32-bit addressing, which eventually became a big problem for IPv5. The format of IPv4 address is the ###.###.###.### format, which is made up of four numerical octets with each set ranging from 0 to 255 and separated by periods. This format allowed for 4.3 billion internet addresses; however, the rapid growth of the internet soon exhausted this number of unique addresses. By 2011, the last remaining blocks of IPv4 addresses were allocated. With IPv5 using the same 32-bit addressing, it would have suffered from the same limitation.

So, IPv5 was abandoned before ever becoming a standard, and the world needs to move on to IPv6.