280 The International Arab Journal of Information Technology, Vol. 7, No. 3, July 2010

Innovative Algorithms for the Header
Processing Transition from IPv4 to IPv6
and Vice Versa
Basil Al-Kasasbeh1, Rafa Al-Qutaish2, and Mohammad Muhairat2
1Faculty of Information Technology, Applied Science University, Jordan
2Department of Software Engineering, Alzaytoonah University of Jordan, Jordan

Abstract: The huge numbers of computers, devices and networks that connected to the Internet in the networking industry,
that require more address space, better Quality of Services support, greater security, and an increasing number of media types
and Internet-capable devices have all contributed to drive the development of new IPv6 protocol. The major importance
during the development of IPv6 has been how to do the transition away from IPv4 towards IPv6 and vice versa. The work on
transition strategies, tools, and mechanisms has been part of the basic IPv6 design effort from the beginning. The transition
process from the current IPv4 to the future IPv6 is probably one of the most important subjects during the next generation
protocols. This paper reviews the basics of IPv4 and IPv6 headers, and the methods for managing the transformation between
IPv4 and IPv6. The proposed algorithms deal with header processing transformation transition between IPv4/IPv6 and vice
versa depending on the bi-directional identification and recognition processes of the two distinct headers.

Keywords: IPv4/IPv6 transition, IPv4/IPv6 header processing, IP tunneling, IP encapsulation, address mapping, dual
stack.

Received November 9, 2008; accepted April 14, 2009


1. Introduction
When the Internet first came into use nobody was
thinking that it will grow this fast and one day we will
run out of the IP addresses. Each year the number of the
Internet users more than doubled and number of the
connection became enormous. The continuous growth
of the global Internet requires that its overall
architecture evolve to accommodate the new
technologies that support the growing numbers of users,
applications, appliances, and services. IPv6 is designed
to meet these requirements and allow a return to a
global environment where the addressing rules of the
network are again transparent to the applications. The
current internetworking protocol, IPv4 will be unable to
adequately support additional nodes or the requirements
of new applications because a huge extension of new
networks and IP devices attached to the Internet, this
given that a large IP address space was needed and
hence a new IP protocol would be developed in order to
replace IPv4 [6].
IPv6 is a new network protocol that features
improved scalability and routing, security, ease-of-
configuration, and higher performance compared to
IPv4. Most of today's internet uses IPv4, which is now
more than twenty years old. IPv4 has been remarkably
resilient in spite of its age, but it is beginning to have
problems. Most importantly, there is a growing
shortage of IPv4 addresses, which are needed by all
new machines added to the Internet. Unfortunately,
IPv6 is incompatible with IPv4. However, using the
new protocol will require changes to the software in
every networked device. Consequently, it is necessary
to develop transition mechanisms that enable
applications to continue working while the hosts and
networks are being upgraded. There exist many
reasons to make the transition from IPv4 to IPv6: a
progressive depletion of the IPv4 address space, a
continuous growth of the Internet routing tables,
complex IP host and router configuration issues, user
requirements for mobility, security and quality of
service [21].
The explosive growth of the Internet and its
services has exposed deficiencies in IPv4 at the
Internet's current scale and complexity. IPv6 was
developed specifically to address these deficiencies,
enabling further Internet growth and development. IP
next generation (IPng) was recommended by the IPng
Area Directors of the Internet Engineering Task Force
(IETF) at the Toronto meeting on July 25, 1994, and
documented in RFC 1752. The recommendation was
approved by the internet engineering steering group on
November 17, 1994 and made a proposed standard.
The improvement from IPV4 to IPV6 comes in the
form of simplification of the header format. Even
though the IPV6 addresses are 4 times longer than the
IPV4 addresses, the IPV6 header is only twice the size
of the IPV4 header [5, 15].

Innovative Algorithms for the Header Processing Transition from IPv4 to IPv6 and Vice Versa 281
This paper reviews the basics of IPv4 and IPv6
headers, and the methods for managing the
transformation between IPv4 and IPv6. The proposed
algorithms deal with header processing transformation
transition IPv4/IPv6 and vice versa depending on the
bi-directional identification and recognition processes
of the two distinct headers. This paper is organized as
follows. Section 2 presents a general overview of IPv4
and IPv6. Section 3 explains the detailed explanation of
the proposed algorithms. Finally, section 4 concludes
the paper.

2. IPV4 and IPV6: A General Overview
2.1. The Features of IPv4 and IPv6
IPv4 is widely deployed and it is a data-oriented
protocol to be used on a packet switched inter-network.
IPv6 or IPng is a new version of IP which is designed
to be an evolutionary step from IPv4. The main features
of IPv6 compared with IPv4 are listed below [13, 14,
16]:

1. Larger IP address space; IPv4 uses only 32 bits for
IP address space, which allows only 4 billion nodes
to be identified on the Internet. IPv6 allows 128 bits
for IP address space, that is, 2^128 nodes to be
uniquely identified on the Internet. A larger address
space allows true end-to-end communication,
without NAT or other short term workarounds
against the IPv4 address shortage.
2. Deploy more recent technologies, after IPv4 was
specified since more than 20 years ago, we saw
many technical improvements in networking. IPv6
includes a number of those improvements in its base
specification, allowing people to assume these
features are available everywhere, anytime. These
technologies include – but are not limited to – the
following:
• Auto configuration: with IPv4, Dynamic Host
Configuration Protocol (DHCP) exists but is
optional, a novice user can get into trouble if they
visit another site without a DHCP server, with
IPv6, a stateless host auto-configuration
mechanism is mandatory, this is much simpler to
use and manage than IPv4 DHCP.
• Security: with IPv4, IPsec is optional and you
need to ask the peer if it supports IPsec. With
IPv6, IPsec support is mandatory. By mandating
IPsec, we can assume that you can secure your IP
communication whenever you talk to IPv6
devices.
• Friendly to traffic engineering technologies. IPv6
was designed to allow better support for traffic
engineering. There are no single standards for
traffic engineering yet, so the IPv6 base
specification reserves a 24-bit space in the header
field for those technologies and is able to adapt
to coming standards better than IPv4.
• Multicast: is mandatory in IPv6, which was
optional in IPv4. The IPv6 base specifications
themselves extensively use multicast.
• Better support for ad-hoc networking; scoped
addresses allow better support for ad-hoc
networking. IPv6 supports any cast addresses,
which can also contribute to service discoveries.
3. A cure to routing table growth: the IPv4 backbone
routing table size has been a big headache to ISPs
and backbone operators. The IPv6 addressing
specification restricts the number of backbone
routing entries by advocating route aggregation.
4. Simplified header structures: IPv6 has simpler
packet header structures than IPv4. It will allow
future vendors to implement hardware acceleration
for IPv6 routers easier.
5. Allows flexible protocol extensions: IPv6 allows
more flexible protocol extensions than IPv4 does,
by introducing a protocol header chain. Even
though IPv6 allows flexible protocol extensions,
IPv6 does not impose overhead to intermediate
routers. It is achieved by splitting headers into two
flavours: the headers intermediate routers need to
examine and the headers the end nodes will
examine. This also eases hardware acceleration for
IPv6 routers.
6. Smooth transition from IPv4: there were number of
transition considerations made during the IPv6
discussions. Also, there are large numbers of
transition mechanisms available. You can pick the
most suitable one for your site.
7. Follows the key design principles of IPv4. IPv4
was a very successful design, as proven by the ultra
large-scale global deployment. IPv6 is new version
of IP, and it follows many of the design features
that made IPv4 very successful. This will also
allow smooth transition from IPv4 to IPv6.

2.2. A General Comparison Between IPv4 and
IPv6
Number IPv6 is not meant to be a large step away
from IPv4. For this reason, changes in IPv6 can be
grouped primarily into many categories. The first area
of improvement in IPv6 is expanded routing and
addressing capabilities. IPv6 increases the address size
from 32 to 128 bits; this is four times as large as IPv4.
This expansion supports a much larger number of
addressable nodes and should accommodate all
reasonable scenarios of future growth. There is also
support in IPv6 for simpler auto-configuration of
addresses which will help motivate emerging markets
to adopt the protocol [20, 22].
A next area of improvement in IPv6 is header
format simplification. Although IPv6 addresses are
four times as long as IPv4 address, the IPv6 header is
only twice the size of the IPv4 header. Some of the
IPv4 header fields have been dropped or made

282 The International Arab Journal of Information Technology, Vol. 7, No. 3, July 2010
optional, decreasing overhead and bandwidth cost.
Also, IPv6 includes improved support for options.
These options are placed in extension headers which
are located between the IPv6 header and the transport
layer header. These extension headers can be of
arbitrary length and the total amount of options in a
packet can be greater than the 40 bytes allowed by
IPv4.
IPv6 defines six extension headers. The routing
header is used for extended routing similar to IPv4
loose source route. The fragmentation header is used
for message fragmentation and reassembly. The
authentication header is used for security features like
integrity and authentication. The encapsulation header
is used for message privacy and confidentiality. The
hop-by-hop options header is used for special options
that require hop by hop processing. Finally, the
destination options header contains optional
information that is to be examined by the destination
node.
IPv6 header extensions allow for several advantages;
forwarding is more efficient, less limitation exists on
the length of options in IPv6, and greater flexibility
exists for introducing new options in the future. This
will be highly important as the Internet evolves to meet
the demands of the changing markets of the future.
IPv6 also includes quality-of-service capabilities that
were not addressed effectively by IPv4. The Flow
Label and Priority fields of the IPv6 header can be used
to identify packets which need special handling by
routers, such as real-time and multi-media applications.
This capability is increasingly important as more
applications are being developed that require consistent
throughput [19, 24].
Finally, IPv6 includes security capabilities which
provide support for authentication, data integrity, and
confidentiality. IPv6 includes two mechanisms which
address the lack of effective privacy and authentication
mechanisms in IPv4: the Authentication header and the
Encapsulation header. These mechanisms can be used
individually or together to insure varying levels of
security.

2.3. Header Format
The IPv6 header format is greatly simplified in
comparison to the IPv4 format. This is due to the
removal of several fields and the addition of the IPv6
extension headers [12, 13]. Figures 1 and 2 represent
the structures of the headers formats for IPv6 and IPv4,
respectively.

1. Version (4) 2. Traffic Class (4) 3. Flow label (24)
4. Payload Length (16) 4. Next Header (8) 5. Hop Limit (8)
7. Source IPv6 Address (128)
8. Destination IPv6 Address (128)
Figure 1. The IPv6 header format.
1. Version (4) 2. THL(4) 3. Type of Service (8) 4. Total L. (16)
5. Identification (16) 6. Flags (3) 7. Fragment Offset (13)
8. Time to Live (8) 9. Protocol (8) 10. Header Checksum (16)
11. Source IPv4 Address (32)
12. Destination IPv4 Address (32)
13. Options + Padding
Figure 2. The IPv4 header format.

The ‘version’ field is a 4-bit field that designates the
internet protocol version number of the packet. This
field is common to IPv4 and IPv6. In the case of IPV4,
the ‘version’ field will be equal to 4. While in the case
of IPv6, the ‘version’ field will be equal to 6. This
field is important for routing since IPv6 messages
must be handled differently than IPv4 messages. The
4-bit ‘priority’ field enables a source to specify a
desired packet delivery priority with respect to other
packets from the same source. This field has two
ranges of priority; one range is used for real-time
traffic that is sent at a constant rate and does not
respond to congestion, and the other range is used for
traffic that does respond to congestion. The 24-bit
‘flow label’ field is used to label packets for which
special handling by the IPv6 routers is requested. This
special handling is related to real-time service and
other non-default quality of service issues. The
‘payload length’ field contains a 16-bit unsigned
integer. This field is common to IPv4 and IPv6.
However, in IPv4, this field is called ‘Total Length’
field. This field specifies the size of the packet
following the header in octets. The ‘Next Header’
field serves as an 8-bit selector. This field specifies the
type of extension header that immediately follows the
IPv6 header. The values used in this field are the same
as the IPv4 Protocol field. The ‘Hop Limit’ field
contains an 8-bit unsigned integer. This field is
common to IPv4 and IPv6. However, in IPv4 this field
is called ‘Time to Live’ field. This field is
decremented each time the packet is forwarded. If a
packet with hop limit zero is encountered, it is
discarded. The 128-bit ‘source address’ field contains
the address of the initial source of the packet. The
128-bit ‘destination address’ field contains the address
of the recipient of the packet. The recipient may not be
the final recipient of the packet if the routing header is
present. These fields are present in IPv4, but they are
only 32 bits long. This change in size is due to the
changes in addressing in IPv6.

2.4. Transition Strategies
The introduction of IPv6 technology offers many
benefits over the existing IPv4, but it is important to
continue of applying both technologies until the recent
one cover all applications. A number of strategies
have been developed for managing this transition from

Innovative Algorithms for the Header Processing Transition from IPv4 to IPv6 and Vice Versa 283
IPv4 to IPv6, see [1, 4, 12, 18] for surveys and
overviews about these strategies. Herein we will
explain two of the most common strategies, that is, dual
stack backbone and IPv6 over IPv4 tunneling. The most
straightforward way to introduce IPv6-capable nodes is
the dual stack approach, where IPv6 nodes also have a
complete IPv4 implementation as well. In dual-stack
backbone deployment, all routers in the network
maintain both IPv4 and IPv6 protocol stacks. Dual
Stack routing is the preferred deployment strategy for
network infrastructures with a mixture of IPv4 and IPv6
applications that require both protocols. This strategy
introduced the following disadvantages [10, 23]:
1. All routers must be upgraded to IPv6.
2. Routers require dual addressing scheme.
3. Dual management routing protocols.
4. Sufficient memory for both the IPv4 and IPv6
routing tables.
While in the IPv6 over IPv4 tunneling strategy, the
IPv6 node on the sending side of the tunnel takes the
entire IPv6 packet, and puts it in the data field of an
IPv4 packet. This IPv4 packet is then addressed to the
IPv6 node on the receiving side of the tunnel and sent
to the first node in the tunnel. IPv6 over IPv4 tunneling
encapsulates IPv6 traffic within IPv4 packets, to be sent
over an IPv4 backbone. This enables island IPv6 end
systems and routers to communicate through an
existing IPv4 infrastructure. A variety of tunneling
mechanisms are available for deploying IPv6, such as
manually configured tunnels, generic routing
encapsulation, IPv4-compatible tunnels, 6-over-4
tunnels, intra-site automatic tunnel addressing protocol
and multi-protocol label switching [9, 25]. In addition,
Chen et al. [7, 8] proposed an IPv4/IPv6 transition
Mechanism for SIP-based VOIP applications. In their
research, they utilized a SIPv4 UA with SLT to
communicate with a SIPv6 UA through an open source
IPv6 SIP server. On the other hand, they used the SIPv6
UA to communicate with various commercial software
and hardware-based SIP UAs and PSTN gateways to
exam the functions of the SIPv6 translator.

3. The Proposed Algorithms
When the Internet environment started in applying the
IPv6 technology, two different sets of problems are
raised. The first one is related to having IPv6
communications among two or more IPv6 islands
isolated in the IPv4 world. The solutions of this set of
problems are generally based on dual stack routers and
IPv6/IPv4 tunneling approach. The second set is related
to the establishment of communications between the
existing IPv4 world and the new IPv6 world. The
solutions of this set of problems rely on dual stack
techniques, application level gateways, Network
Address Translation (NAT) technology, or on
temporary allocation of IPv4 address and IPv4/IPv6
tunneling. The proposed algorithms depend on
understanding the received datagram, capturing the
header, identifying the header, verification the header,
transformation the datagram to the destination
environment, and then transmitting the datagram to the
destination address. Furthermore, they are based on
the bi-directional operation that leads to converting the
received datagram to the destination environment.
These proposed algorithms deal with both the deep
understanding and analyses of the headers of both
technologies (IPv4 and IPv6) and the methods for
managing the transformation between these
technologies. Moreover, they handle the header
processing transition from IPv4 to IPv6 and vice
versa. However, this process depends on the bi-
directional identification and recognition processes of
the two distinct headers. Thus, they depends on the Bi-
Directional Intelligent Processing System (BDIPS) [3]
and the Bi-Directional Mapping System (BDMS) [2].
The proposed header processing algorithms deal with
the in-depth understanding of the two technologies of
the header fields, that is, from IPv6 to IPv4 and vice
versa.

3.1. Transition from IPv6 Header to IPv4
Header
When make a transition from IPv6 header to IPv4
header, it is necessary to store 0100 in the ‘version’
field of the IPv4 header to indicate that the used IP is
of version 4. The contents of the ‘Traffic Class’ (TC)
field of IPv6 Header will be mapped to the ‘type of
service’ field of IPv4 header, taking into account that
the size of TC is 4 bits, for the details of this mapping
see Figure 3. In IPv4, the size of the ‘identification’
field is 16 bits, while the size of the ‘flow label’ filed
in IPv6 header is 24 bits. However, when copying the
contents of the ‘flow label’ filed to the ‘identification’
filed an overflow may be occurred. Thus, to solve this
problem, we have used a counter called Packet
Counter (PC) which should be initialized to zero when
a new packet just started or if the destination address ,
source address, or the next header have been changed.
If this is not the case, that is, no new packet started
and the destination address, source address, and the
next header have not been changed, then the PC
should be increased by one. Later on, the PC will be
stored in the ‘Identification’ field of the IPv4 header.
The contents of the rest of the IPv4 header’s field
will be based on the contents of the ‘Next Header’
(NH) filed of IPv6. However, if the NH filed has 6 or
17, then save PC in identification field in IPv4 header,
copy the contents of NH field to the ‘protocol’ field in
IPv4 header, map the IPv6 ‘destination address’ to
IPv4 ‘destination address’, map the IPv6 ‘source
address’ to IPv4 ‘source address’, use the BDMS as in
[25] to perform the mapping of the destination and
source addresses. In addition, copy the contents of

284 The International Arab Journal of Information Technology, Vol. 7, No. 3, July 2010
hope limit field to the TTL field in IPv4 header,
compute the header length and save it in the Hdr length
in IPv4, compute the payload length, sum the Hdr
length and payload length and save the result in the
total length filed in IPv4, compute the header
checksum, and save the result in the header checksum
field in IPv4 header.
Furthermore, if the NH is 43, then copy the EH to the
option field in IPv4 header and check the NH.
Whereas, if the NH is 44, process the fragment EH to
obtain the flags and fragmentation offset values, copy
the two values to the flags and fragmentation offset
fields in IPv4 header, and check the NH.
























Figure 3. Mapping the contents of the TC to TOS.

For more details on the transition from IPv6 header to
IPv4 header, see Figure 4 which illustrates the
algorithm of this transition process.

3.2. Transition from IPv4 Header to IPv6
Header
Figure 5 shows the detailed algorithm of the transition
process from IPv4 Header to IPv6 Header. However,
Some fields of the IPv6 Header will contain the same
values from the corresponding fields of the IPv6
Header, that is, the fields which will be copied from
IPv4 header to IPv6 Header without any change are:
‘Identification’ to ‘Flow Label’, and ‘Time to Live’ to
‘Hop Limit’. Furthermore, the ‘Version’ field of the
IPv6 Header will contain 0110 to denote that the IP
version is 6. The contents of the TOS field of IPv4
Header should be mapped to the TC field IPv6 Header,
see Figure 6 for the details of this mapping. The
‘Source’ and ‘Destination’ addresses fields of IPv4 will
be mapped to the ‘Source’ and ‘Destination’ addresses
fields of IPv6 using the Bi-Directional Mapping System
(BDMS), see [25] for the details of the Bi-Directional
Mapping System BDMS. The payload length will be
computed by subtracting the contents of the ‘header
length’ field of IPv4 header from the contents of the
‘total length’ field of IPv4, then, the resulted value
will be saved in the ‘payload length’ fields in IPv6
header. The contents of the ‘fragment extension
header’ of IPv6 will be based on the contents of the
‘fragment offset’ field of IPv4. However, if the
‘fragment offset’ field of IPv4 is not equal to zero,
then copy the contents of the ‘flags’ and ‘fragment
offset’ fields of IPv4 header to the corresponding
fields in the ‘fragment extension header’ of IPv6.
Finally, if the ‘protocol’ field of the IPv4 header
contains six, then we should take in to account that the
used protocol is the TCP; otherwise, the protocol is
the UDP.

4. Conclusions
Currently the number of available IPv6 applications is
very limited compared with huge applications of IPv4;
this referred to as an island in the ocean. Therefore the
transition algorithms are the best options for transition
from IPv4 to IPv6 and vice versa until every host or
router is converted to IPv6. The scope of this paper
exceeds the encapsulation and tunneling which are
nowadays more suitable ways to perform
TC
X X X X
0 0 0 0
0 0 0 1
0 0 1 0
0 0 1 1
0 1 0 0
0 1 0 1
0 1 1 0
0 1 1 1
1 0 0 0
1 0 0 1
1 0 1 0
1 0 1 1
1 1 0 0
1 1 0 1
1 1 1 0
1 1 1 1

X X X X X X X X
0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0
0 1 0 0 0 0 0 0
0 1 1 0 0 0 0 0
1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
1 0 1 0 0 0 0 0
1 1 0 0 0 0 0 0
1 1 1 0 0 0 0 0

IPv6
TOS
IPv4
Level of Precedence

Innovative Algorithms for the Header Processing Transition from IPv4 to IPv6 and Vice Versa 285
transformation and adaptation between IPv4 and IPv6.
However, this paper concentrates on finding an
adaptive method for transition between these two
versions. The proposed algorithms deal with the
intelligent method of transformation and adaptation
between IPv4 and IPv6 that called BDIPS.
Furthermore, this paper constructs novel algorithms
that depend on understanding of the two environment
of transmission, that is, received the source packet
then converting the information header to be adaptable
to the destination end. They are simple and easy to
implement as well as they are very efficient and
intelligent. In addition, they reduce the packet size
effectively rather than encapsulation – which enlarges
the packet size due to additional header(s) – and thus
reduce the overall transmission time.

Figure 4. The algorithm of the header processing transition from the IPv6 to IPv4.

286 The International Arab Journal of Information Technology, Vol. 7, No. 3, July 2010


Figure 5. The algorithm of the header processing transition from the IPv4 to IPv6.


Figure 6. Mapping the contents of the TOS to TC.

Level of Precedence
TOS
X X X X X X X X
0 0 0 X X X X X
0 0 1 X X X X X
0 1 0 X X X X X
0 1 1 X X X X X
1 0 0 X X X X X
1 0 1 X X X X X
1 1 0 X X X X X
1 1 1 X X X X X

IPv4
TC
X X X X
0 0 0 1
0 0 1 1
0 1 0 1
0 1 1 1
1 0 0 1
1 0 1 1
1 1 0 1
1 1 1 1

IPv6

Innovative Algorithms for the Header Processing Transition from IPv4 to IPv6 and Vice Versa 287
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[25] Zheng Y. and Akhtar S., Networks for Computer
Scientists and Engineers, Oxford University
Press, 2002.

288 The International Arab Journal of Information Technology, Vol. 7, No. 3, July 2010
Basil Al-Kasasbeh received the MSc
and PhD degrees in networks,
systems and communication devices
from Siberian State University of
Telecommunications and Informatics,
Novosibirsk in 1994 and 2002,
respectively. Currenty, he is an
assistant professor at the Faculty of
Information Technology in the Applied Science
University in Jordan. His research interests include
mobile and wireless systems, mobile IP, and IPV6.


Rafa Al-Qutaish received the BSc
degree in computer science from
Yarmouk University, Jordan in 1993,
the MSc degree in software
engineering from University of Putra,
Malaysia in 1998, and PhD degree in
software engineering from the School
of Higher Technology University of
Québec, Canada in 2007. Currenty, he is an assistant
professor at the Department of Software Engineering in
Alzaytoonah University of Jordan. His research
interests include communication software engineering,
software measurements, software engineering
standardizations, software quality engineering, and
applied artificial intelligence.






























Mohammad Muhairat received
the MS degree in computer
engineering from Kharkov State
Technical University of Radio
Electronics, Ukraine in 1997, and
the PhD degree in computer
engineering from Kharkov National
University of Radio Electronics,
Ukraine in 2002. His research interests are in software
engineering fields, such as, requirements specification,
design & testing, UML notations, and formal methods
for requirements specification & design.

Innovative Algorithms for the Header Processing Transition from IPv4 to IPv6 and Vice Versa 289