IPv6 Transition tools and migration strategies

IP (Internet Protocol) networks are increasingly becoming the unifying medium for a multitude of services and applications. Operators have adopted the IP protocol to pool their heterogeneous service offerings. To anticipate the growing need for IP addresses, operators, network equipment manufacturers and academics have collaborated to specify a new-generation protocol, IPv6 (Internet Protocol version 6). The IPv6 specifications and analysis documents are mature enough to consider operational deployment in operators' networks. Nevertheless, the introduction of this new version of the protocol imposes significant constraints on the interoperability and interworking of the two versions of the protocol: IPv4 and IPv6.

IPv4 is now massively deployed, but the associated address space is reaching its limits, to the point of jeopardizing the development of the Internet. The predicted exhaustion of IPv4 public addresses (see § 2.1 ) makes the deployment of IPv6 a major challenge for operators and service providers. But implementing a migration strategy is complicated by two major constraints: the need to guarantee continuity of IPv4 services during the transition period, characterized by the inability to provide every customer with a public IPv4 address, and the incompatibility of IPv4 and IPv6 protocols, making it difficult to interconnect the two worlds. In addition, operators and service providers must also take into account several constraints for the introduction of IPv6 in networks and service infrastructures, and design new architectures taking advantage of IPv6's new intrinsic functions. Paragraph 3 describes in detail the constraints to be considered when enabling IPv6.

The aim of this article is to describe some solutions for enabling IPv6 in networks (see §