FSL3/4 on NEDIA (Flow Separation by Layer 3/4 on Network Environment Using Dual IP Addresses)

Abstract

Solutions for IP address depletion problem can be categorized by two methods. The first method, referred as IPv4-to-IPv6 transition, is the way of replacing IPv4 with IPv6, as a long-term solution. However, IPv4-to-IPv6 transition requires modification of both all IPv4 network equipments and all IPv4 hosts. It also needs incredible amount of times and expense. The latter is a usage of NAT (Network Address Translation), as a short-term solution. NAT translates the IP address and TCP or UDP port of the IPv4 packet header and performs demultiplexing of incoming data flows. The modification of packet is NAT's basic operation but leads to many problems such as IPSec supporting on local network, ALG dependency for supporting various Internet applications, degradation of router/gateway's packet forwarding performance, etc. In this paper, we propose NEDIA which is network environment for sharing public IP address assigned to a router/gateway at the network boundary. We also propose and implement FSL3/4 which is a data flow separation algorithm to overcome limitation of NAT. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2004.