Global Mobile IPv6 addressing using transition mechanisms

The adoption of the IPv4 protocol in wireless technologies has considerably increased the number of hosts that can potentially access the global Internet. The pressure for more IP addresses and the almost exhaustion of the IPv4 address space has raised again the interest in the IPv6 protocol. This paper describes an approach for implementing wireless networks with global Internet connectivity using private IPv4 addresses and transition mechanisms published by IETF. The approach described in this paper is called Transparent IPv6. It consists of virtually assigning IPv6 addresses to private IPv4 hosts without modifying end-user devices. The mobile hosts with virtual IPv6 addresses are fully addressable through the global IPv4 Internet by using IPv6 addresses or fully qualified domain names (FQDN). As shown in the paper, it permits the deployment of mobile networks with global Internet connectivity without requiring public IPv4 addresses.