An IPv6 Translation Scheme for Small and Medium Scale Deployment

With the fast growth of Internet, IPv4 address exhaustion is an imminent problem. IPv6 is proposed to resolve this issue. It is identified that the deployment of IPv6 will be progressive. This leads to the coexistence of IPv4 and IPv6 networks during the transition time. It is important to study how to enable communication between IPv4 only hosts and IPv6 only hosts. In this paper, we propose a new lightweight IPv4/IPv6 protocol translation scheme GATEVI and an Application Layer Gateway (ALG) framework for small and medium network deployments. A prototype of the scheme is implemented and a test bed is set up. The proposed scheme is flexible, resource efficient and does not require any modification on client hosts. Its low requirement on resources such as IPv6 prefix makes it particularly suitable for small and medium scale deployments.