A New Design of Embedded IPv4/IPv6 Dual-Stack Protocol

Embedded devices with access to Internet have been widely used. Due to the large scale of deployment of IPv4 throughout Internet, the complete transition from IPv4 to IPv6 will take a long time. In order to make embedded devices work well during the transition period, we design an embedded IPv4/IPv6 dual stack. It integrates the open-source IPv4 stack LwIP with EIPv6, a single IPv6 stack we have developed for embedded systems. Considering the format difference between the IPv4 and IPv6 addresses, we propose a novel address format, called dual-stack address, to integrate the two address formats together. The dual stack has been implemented and tested on the evaluation board LM3s8962, in which the dual stack consumes about 33KB of ROM and 6KB of RAM. Meanwhile, the communication speed can reach 40 KB/s, which satisfies most embedded devices.