IPv6 in der Automobil-Industrie

IPv4 is currently the most widely used Internet protocol. However, the limited address space of 32 bits is problematic, as it can address a maximum of 4.295 billion devices. With the economic boom in Asia and the demand for IP addresses for mobile devices, household appliances, sensor networks for bridges, homes, or RFID chips, and in the future also for televisions and vehicles, the demand for IP addresses is rising rapidly. Therefore, in 1993, the development of TCP/IP version 6 began. IPv6 offers an address space of 128 bits, allowing for a significantly larger number of devices on the Internet to be assigned IP addresses: approximately 340 sextillion! This means that, theoretically, around 667 trillion IPv6 addresses can be provided for every square millimeter of the Earth's surface. Since the transition from IPv4 to IPv6 is intended to be gradual, many devices are already equipped with a dual-stack implementation, meaning they support both protocol variants. The automotive industry is also affected. Today, there are vehicle control units that use the IPv4 protocol for data transmission to the vehicle's diagnostic interface. These control units consist of microcontrollers that often face limitations such as low processing power and limited memory. Implementing such a complex protocol as IPv6 in this environment presents a real challenge. This book demonstrates, using a concrete example, how the embedded software of an IPv4 protocol stack can be expanded to a dual-stack of IPv4/IPv6.