Design and evaluation of IPv4/IPv6 translator for IP based industrial network protocol

This paper presents the design and evaluation of IPv4/IPv6 translator which supports co-existence of IPv4 based and IPv6 based fieldbus protocols. Although IPv6 is the subsequent version of IPv4, there is no compatibility between them. A number of fieldbus protocols work on IP, but they are designed on IPv4. Moreover, IPv6 based fieldbus will co-exist with IPv4 based fieldbus. Therefore, we should consider the co-existence of IPv6 based and IPv4 based fieldbus. This paper introduces the experiments to achieve the interoperability between IPv4 based field device and IPv6 based field device. The authors investigate the required functionalities for the translator, design the solution and evaluate the behavior. The authors concluded that intelligent translation functionality is required in addition to non-intelligent one. Moreover, the authors concluded proposed design reduces the administrative load. The authors choose FOUNDATION Fieldbus HSE for this work since it is the representative of IP based fieldbus protocols.