A survey of transition mechanisms from IPv4 to IPv6 — Simulated test bed and analysis

摘要

The introduction of IPv6 has opened up several questions with reference to its adaption and transition from IPv4 to IPv6 and is one of the crucial issues being frequently discussed in networking community today. IPv6 provides many seamless features that makes it far better protocol as compared to its predecessor IPv4. It is a well-known fact that IPv4 is a defacto standard at present and is currently been deployed in almost all the Internet architecture, hence the transition process from IPv4 to IPv6 is very challenging. In order to avoid the transition, or in actual sense to delay it, many techniques have been introduced such as CIDR and NAT but the fact is, the pool of IP addresses is depleting and ultimate solution is to move towards IPv6. The objectives of this survey paper are twofold. Firstly, to highlight the issues related with the transition from IPv4 to IPv6. Secondly, to find the transition mechanism that can be provided seamlessly to end users where they will be able to use all the services of IPv4. In order to achieve the said objectives a simulated test bed has been deployed at Mehran University of Engineering and Technology (MUET), Jamshoro, Pakistan. The purpose is to tackle the issues and challenges that are likely to be faced during the transition from IPv4 to IPv6. GNS3 and Wireshark are used for simulation and DSTM has been chosen as the transition mechanism for the test bed. DSTM allow both protocols to run simultaneously and the results show that it also provide seamless transition from IPv4 to IPv6.