A software defined approach to unified IPv6 transition

The IPv6 transition has been an ongoing process throughout the world due to the exhaustion of the IPv4 address space. However, this transition leads to costly end-to-end network upgrades and poses new challenges of managing a large number of devices with a variety of transition protocols. Recognizing these difficulties, we propose a software defined approach which provides a unified, novel way to deploy IPv6 in a cost-effective, flexible manner. Our deployment and experiments demonstrate significant benefits of this approach, including low complexity and high flexibility of adopting different existing transition mechanisms, as well as low cost because there is no need for upgrading network terminals.