Migration to the new internet - supporting inter operability between IPv4 and IPv6 networks

Abstract

The evolution of communications towards a single unified network based on IP, brings new issues to the Internet, as a new business paradigm appears and an explosion in the number of users will continue. IPv6 will support this new Internet, but, in spite of its advantages, it will be expectable that it will coexist with IPv4 for a long time, due to the huge size of the Internet today. The migration phase will play a central role in this process and special care has to be taken concerning inter-operability issues. From the existing set of inter-operability solutions, NAPT-PT is the most promising for the nearest future, as it efficiently uses network resources, without wasting the spare IPv4 addressing space. This paper presents an Inter Working Unit based on NAPT-PT, which have been developed in GNU/Linux Operating System. Considerations about the IWU design are taken and functional and performance tests are described. © Springer-Verlag 2004.