Transition from IPv4 to IPv6: A Translation Approach

IPv4 addresses are already depleted in IANA and will be soon exhausted in RIR while more clients are pouring into the Internet. IPv6, as the only available next generation Internet protocol, is still not commercially successful because a scheme that could solve the migration of IPv4 resources to IPv6 network, as well as mutual communication between the two incompatible protocols, has not been fully developed and deployed. Translation solution provides a proper approach to address this problem. In this article, we propose IVI, an IPv4/IPv6 translation scheme, in order to facilitate resource migration and protocol transition. We explain how it works to translate between IPv4 and IPv6, and how combinations of IVI flavours and various translation scenarios are used in each phase of transition. The evaluation of scalability and robustness, which is important to a widely deployed translation scheme, is also discussed.