IPv6 addresses: why so small a number of bits on a new design?
While, there are (possibly) some people (only know about Jim Fleming…) on the Internet who are thinking about IPv8 and IPv16, their design is far away from acceptance and implementation. In the meantime 128 bits was the best choice regarding header overhead and data transport. Consider the minimum Maximum Transfer Unit (MTU) in IPv4 (576 octets) and in IPv6 (1280 octets), the header length in IPv4 is 20 octets (minimum, can increase to 60 octets with IPv4 options) and in IPv6 is 48 octets (fixed). This is 3.4 % of MTU in IPv4 and 3.8 % of MTU in IPv6. This means the header overhead is almost equal. More bits for addresses would require bigger headers and therefore more overhead. Also, consider the maximum MTU on normal links (like Ethernet today): it’s 1500 octets (in special cases: 9k octets using Jumbo frames). Ultimately, it wouldn’t be a proper design if 10 % or 20 % of transported data in a Layer-3 packet were used for addresses and not for payload.
